Designing the Jump ‘n Bump remake, part 1

Hello again, and sorry for the lack of updates. My weekly schedule never really caught wind, eh? Well, if I could keep this monthly, maybe that could work. Too bad I have quite a bit of other projects going on so I can’t really concentrate on game development, but hopefully I’ll get back to it soon enough. But in the meantime, thought I have nothing to show you guys, I have lots to talk about. So let’s get this thing underway!

So, the subject of today’s rant is my “Jump ‘n Bumb remake”. If you’ve already checked out my GISHWHES-game (which I posted about a few weeks ago), you should already have a basic idea of what the core gameplay will be like (I guess you could now say that it served as a prototype for this remake). So let’s have a deeper look at what I have in mind for this “remake” and how I’m thinking of improving the original game’s ideas.

Since this is going to be kind of a long rant, I’m gonna cut this in two. This time we’ll just talk about Jump ‘n Bump, next time we’ll have a look into what I have in mind for the remake.

Screenshot of the menu screen

So, let’s talk a bit about the original then, shall we? In case you haven’t tried it (which you totally should), the original Jump ‘n Bump is a small and nifty little local multiplayer game for 2-4 players (well technically you could play it alone, but there is nothing to do obviously). Don’t worry, even though the original game was for the MS-DOS, it has been ported to work on modern PCs. That means there’s no excuse for you to not try it out, you hear? Invite some friends over and have a blast! The game itself plays like this: Every player controls a small fluffy bunny and your goal is to BRUTALLY MURDER the other players bunnies by jumping on them, thus earning points. And that’s the whole game basicly. Pretty simple right? Oh, but that’s the beauty of it: Simplicity.

So how does the game actually work? Let’s break that down a bit. Firstly, there are only three keys per player: left, right and jump. That means running and jumping is all you’ve got to accomplish your mission of bunny genocide, but doesn’t mean that the outcome of each match is based on blind luck; there’s quite a bit of skill involved. You can get a major edge on an inexperienced player by making quick movements, faint “attacks” and baiting them to come to you. Since jumping on someone is the only way to get kills, this actually makes for some very heated battles, especially when four players are involved. And because the game is played hot-seat (though the modern port offers netplay support) it’s a whole other level of intensity to have your friends next to you while you fight to DEATH!

The levels themselves are pretty simple as well. Being tile-based, there’s only five kinds of tiles in all: air (empty space), ground (solid), ice (solid), water (you automatically float up) and springs (empty, but with a spring on the bottom). You can see the different tiles quite well in the screenshot below. And even though over the years fans have made tons of levels for this game, there’s one pretty major technical limitation: you can’t change the level in game. You have to modify the files to change levels.

Screenshot of the default level

Speaking of custom levels, the game was also very moddable. Actually, if you wanted to make a new level, you basically had to make a mod or the game. You could change the menu screen, the fonts, all the character and object graphics, the music, the sounds… You could basically make the game look something totally different.

You should now have quite a good picture of what Jump ‘n Bump is like, right? If for some reason you’re very thick or just otherwise didn’t understand any of this, go play the damn thing! Seriously, do it. Anyways, next time we’ll start digging into my own designs. Don’t expect anything too mind blowing though, since I’ll be sticking with the principle of keeping things simple.

Till next time folks!