Grumper

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Danni's picture
Grumper.png
Game File: 

Move with the Arrow Keys. Jump using Shift. Hold Jump to vary your jump height.

More info:

Grumper is a Jumper clone I decided to make after playing the newly fixed Linux version of Super Meat Boy for a while and then reminiscing about the classic Jumper games by YoMamasMama, and then wanting to design a Jumper-esque game of my own. I also made it because a while back, Sergio suggested I try experimenting with game difficulty by deliberately making the game easier or harder to play.

The game itself is quite like Jumper, although it uses Super Meat Boy-style deceleration (insta-brake while on land).
Unlike Jumper or Super Meat Boy, however, you can't double-jump or wall-jump.

- You want to get to the rapidly spinning portal on the other end of the level.
- Leaving the screen from ANY side will kill you, as will colliding with a spike ball. When you die, you reconstitute at the beginning of the level and any moving gimmicks will reset.
- The up-arrow blocks bounce you high (sixteen blocks high I believe). Normally you can only jump four blocks high. When you hit these blocks from the sides or from below, they act like a normal wall (that is, they don't bounce you).
- Red, green, blue blocks are toggle walls, which can be turned on or off by tapping the same color power switch.
- Moving platforms travel horizontally in one direction until they hit an obstruction, causing them to reverse.

The game is broken up into three difficulties: Easy, Normal, and Hard.

- Normal is the original set of 15 levels I created. The set starts off pretty basic with the first few levels, but gets pretty challenging near the end. Perhaps the difficulty curve is rather steep, but with only a small set of levels there isn't much I can do about that. Intended for most players (hopefully).

- Easy takes the Normal levels and makes most of the jumps shorter/easier, adds guard rails in some places (to prevent you from flying off the screen too easily), increases the coverage area of spring blocks, etc.

- Hard takes the Normal levels and increases the coverage area of spikes, shrinks a lot of platforms, and sometimes even forces you to complete a level in a roundabout way. Expect some rather tricky jumps. For veteran players only.

STATISTICS:

As you complete each level, the game saves statistics into a file on your hard drive. After you finish playing, look for a file in the game's folder titled "stats-16986802.txt" or something similar (the game will tell you exactly what the file is called). You can then select View Results from the main menu, choose this file from the selection dialog, and be able to view all the places you died, and how many times you died on each level. It would be pretty cool if you could upload the statistics file here as a comment attachment. That way I could see where people are dying the most, and just how difficult my levels are. Granted, the statistics are rather basic. They only include death locations, which aren't incredibly meaningful as far as determining where players are having trouble, especially in the more open areas. I tried addressing this a bit by adding in some spikes where you would normally just fall to a lower level on a failed jump. Still, I'm curious about this (and I don't feel like improving on the system - I'm kinda fed up with MMF2 right now as it is).

Note: Even if you don't finish the game (you give up on a certain level and close the game), it will still spit out a statistics file, and you're welcome to submit that as well. It just won't include statistics for any unfinished levels.

Other remarks:

This really is Game Maker territory. Game Maker excels at tile-based multi-level games where the same elements are reused throughout each stage. MMF2 does not. In fact, MMF2 has really poor support for global objects. This forced me to stuff all 15 levels into a single frame rather than have them on separate frames in order for me to retain my sanity (otherwise I'd have to retroactively apply changes to EVERY SINGLE LEVEL ONE BY ONE every time I wanted to change something). And then I tried squeezing 45 levels into the same frame but MMF2 really choked on that. I was forced to use a separate frame for each difficulty, thus any changes I might make in the future (if I can even be bothered) are not going to be global across difficulties unless I manually apply the changes to all difficulties. Also MMF2 is slow. Really slow. I think if I were to make a similar game again, I would stay far away from MMF2 and use something like Game Maker 5.3 or hell, even C++/Python/some other established programming language with Allegro/SFML instead. Klik just isn't cut out for this.

The music comes from an old module song, "galactic" by dark halo.

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Comments

Zecks's picture

as a jumper vet

i have a mouth and i must scream

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRHGHRHGO%YI/Gvbye6897yi

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Zecks's picture

really though

SMB slipperiness with jumper levels is hitler (vs stalin. gomirg later today/tonight hopefully.) but it's not like it wasn't intended. it just wasn't really fun

gotta play some dustforce to calm down

Danni's picture

Okay, so apparently the

Okay, so apparently the difficulty curve is really uneven. This is what I get for merely exaggerating the tricky parts of the Normal levels for the Hard difficulty.

Noyb's picture

Still wasn't grokking the

Still wasn't grokking the momentum by Normal level 8. Quit after dying two jumps from the end (so, SO many discrete actions that can all be undone in an instant for my tastes).

Another option is to define levels externally in files (e.g. saved files with the Array object) and create your own level editor in MMF that saves and loads in that format, leaving a single frame to handle the main game logic. Adds a lot of development overhead and removes some of the speed of MMF's WYSIWIG level editing, but it should solve your duplicated code issue at least.

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stats-27412558.txt262 bytes
Danni's picture

Do you think you'd be

Do you think you'd be willing to try this again on Easy?

I didn't really feel like putting in the effort to make external levels. MMF is just really sloppy about stuff like this in general and the last time I tried it ("Eat Lots of Candy") I ended up with something that froze for several seconds at the start of the frame for no reason, and it just felt really clunky to work with overall.

sergiocornaga's picture

Made it to level 6 on easy

Made it to level 6 on easy and level 3 on hard before giving up. I'll probably try again later. I died so many times in hard mode it was deemed "too many" (felt like over 1000). I am sorry to say that the movement in this was some of the least intuitive I have ever faced, at no point did I feel I was improving nor did the slipperiness ever feel quite right to me.

I also noticed that despite performing what I thought were the exact same keypresses, I didn't always get the same result (in one part of level 6 this meant I failed about 50% of time), but this is probably a subtle flaw of every MMF platformer seeing as I've also noticed it in Knytt Stories and The Underside.

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stats-23877996.txt130 bytes
Danni's picture

"Too many" happens when you

"Too many" happens when you die 100 times or more. Actually, much like FPS games limit the number of decals that get put on surfaces, I decided to limit the number of death location markers for sanity reasons - if you die more than 100 times it will only record the most recent 100 deaths.

Also, the last attempted level doesn't get any stats recorded - I think I overlooked this. I really should have recorded them anyway.

The movement is the way it is mainly because I was used to how Super Meat Boy handled, but now that I look back on it I probably should have made both deceleration _and_ acceleration instantaneous, and reduced the horizontal movement speed.

Zecks's picture

yeah the level design was

yeah the level design was fine overall but the physics made them unplayable

Luluna's picture

Six levels into the game on

Six levels into the game on the hard sadist difficulty.
orz
Why am I doing this to myself. Whyyyyyyyy

Luluna's picture

...

Wait what... But how? You can't... wait, maybe if-!
Oh, but then... No. How do you...

I call shenanigans. You must be some gaming god/goddess if you have actually beaten these stages.

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Zecks's picture

tbh that's one of the easier

tbh that's one of the easier things if you've played enough masocore

pensive-mosquitoes