Z Penguin

(Made for Mark Brown's 2019 GMTK Game Jam)

This Penguin loves Diamonds. Help it get them!

Only one: Button. Just Press and Hold Z!

I went with the theme of One Button and One Direction. Holding Z will charge up a jump, and releasing it will launch the player. The goal is to reach the Diamond in each level. 

I went with a mobile aspect ratio, although early on I started noticing some serious drawbacks. The two main problems I ran in to were:

1) Mobile screen ratio is TINY horizontally. Due to the size, I wasn't able to do much in the way of slopes to roll down and jump at the end. 

2) Only having the ability to launch upwards meant that all horizontal movement had to be done through the environment. This meant a lot of moving platforms and launchers. 

This also lead to an interesting dilemma in level design -- the player has to be able to succeed or fail from every position on the map. Because everything is physics based and you can only move up, moving up has to lead to death or success otherwise the game will be completely locked. This lead to lots of use of spikes and small ramps to move the player back to a usable position. 

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it, and please leave a comment if you've played it and have any thoughts!