Designing the Jump ‘n Bump remake, part 2

Welcome back. Did you miss me? I hope not, since it shouldn’t be that long since last time. Anyways, if you haven’t yet read the first part of this rant, I suggest you go do it (unless you are already familiar with Jump ‘n Bump). Just click here and the magics of da Interwebz will… do it’s magic?

Moving on. Like I said last time, today we shall be having a look at my own plans for the remake. But since the original is already pretty excellent in it’s simplicity, that raises the question: What to change from an already great game? I say you give it deeper gameplay. Not more complex, but deeper. Since I’m ranting on and on and on about simplicity, it should be pretty obvious that I’ll be sticking to the nature of the original as much as I can and keep things simple.

Let’s start with the levels then, since that was probably the easiest aspect to come up with improvements to. In the original, the levels were always pretty simple: only five types of tiles and size was always fixed. I plan to change both aspects.

Layout for levels

Firstly, the level size. Sure, you could make smaller levels in Jump ‘n Bump by covering up the walls and ceiling with ground and so forth, but you couldn’t really make any special kind of levels, like more horizontal, vertical or just plain bigger ones. I intend to address that. Haven’t yet thought of whether I should make the size fully customizable or just provide several “set” sizes, but the bottom line is there should be more options for it. I guess I can’t make that decision before playtesting it. What I do know is that there will be a definite maximum size. If the levels are too big, it quickly eats away with the intensity of the game. You only have four players after all, so with too much free space the pace of the game slows down considerably.

Secondly, the tiles. All of the tiles from the original will be making a return, that’s for sure, but I have been thinking of new ones as well. To make the level more interesting, there should be some kind of “hazards” that affect the players. Not traps or anything that can kill you (well actually, haven’t thought that through yet), but something that will affect your movement, like the ice. Two additions that I’m pretty sure of are blocks that slow you down and limit your jumping, and blocks that crubmle when you stand on them for long enough. The springs might get accompanied by ones that spring you forward with a higher speed instead of up. I’ve also been thinking about teleportation pads (or I think rabbit holes might be a better fit), that will – surprise surprise – instantly transport you to it’s counterpart. I’m not how well that would support the core gameplay, but telefragging is always fun.

While we’re on the subject of levels and terrain and such, another quite big change I’ve been thinking of is the water physics, or rather the swimming. In Jump ‘n Bump swimming is very, very limited. When you land in water, you always sink just one tile down and immediately float back up. You can’t dive at will, nor can you stop and float still. Also, you have no friction. So for the remake some better swimming mechanics would be in order, don’t you think? A quick rundown of my ideas: You can dive freely, but not without penalties. You move slower underwater and while you can also stay submerged, you can’t do it indefinitely; you have a limited amount of air. If you stay underwater for too long, you lose consciousness, float back up, and remain unconscious for a short time. This gives your opponents an opportunity to kill you.

Lastly, two subjects that go kind of hand in hand. Powerups and controls. Yes, I’m thinking of adding powerups to the game, but as always, simplicity is the key. I’ve thought about this very carefully and I feel the ones I’ve come up with so far support the game’s core mechanics quite well. To keep things balanced most of them would likely have a short time limit. Here’s some of them:

• Double jump: quite self-expalatory
• Speed upgrade: you run a bit faster
• “Extra life”: you can survive the next hit
• Blocking: you can block hits by pressing down, but only while standing still on the ground

Now as you see, only one of the powerups mentioned would require the use of a new key. My aim for the remake would be, that I would only add one new key to the game: the down key. It would mostly be used just for swimming and powerups, but I’m still thinking ways to tie it into the core gameplay.

Man, this turned out to be quite lenghty, didn’t it? I think this would be a very good time to call it quits. If you have any ideas of your own, or just comments on my designs, feel free to drop them into the comment section. I’ll be letting this one sit until I get a prototype done, so don’t expect any news on this one any time soon.

I already have an idea for my next rant, so hopefully I’ll get it done in a timely manner. See ya folks next time!

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!