Blog Post

Dawn: Infinite Runner Game

Between the Ludum Dare, school, and everything else, I've been turning out a lot of small projects this month. I recently participated in a competition on The Game Creators. The competition, inspired by Flappy Bird, presented one goal: make the most addictive infinite game possible.

My entry, titled Dawn, also draws inspiration from the classic Canabalt. It's a sidescrolling runner in which you play a man who must jump, smash, and fly his way through a scrolling obstacle course as the days pass by.

This competition was focused on addictive potential, so I implemented a few different ideas in an attempt to grab the attention of players of the game:

• Online Highscores: they give the player something to shoot for. He can see what other people have done, know that it's possible, and attempt to prove himself better than them.
• Day/Night Cycles: My idea here was to give the player a concrete sense of progress - more visceral goals to shoot for than the elusive high score.
• Feel: Polish. If the game simply feels good to play, I reasoned, people will want to play it more! Key elements of this in Dawn include particles when smashing through walls and a good set of character animations that makes you feel awesome when you crash through those girders. At the suggestion of Justin Britch, I took a minute to implement a simple animation at the game end: quickly ticking up the user's score from 0, rather than just displaying it. This gives the score a sense of weight and grants the player extra satisfaction at his achievement.

It remains to be seen how effective these strategies were. Clearly Flappy Bird didn't need many of these things to become what it did!