TIGSource Forums

Good evening TIGers,

After a rather longer than expected delay, my game 'The Unicyclist' has now launched! It can be played for free here (requires Flash):

http://www.teagames.com/games/theunicyclist/play.php

A select few of you may have seen this game at TIGJam UK2. I'm pretty sure it's the best game about a guy with a big moustache riding a unicycle whilst wearing a propeller hat released this year!

Although the design isn't flawless I'm pretty happy with how the game turned out and there's some fairly deep content in there for anyone who gets really good at the game.

Lastly, it might be of some interest that I found music for the game via the then-brand-new TIGSource Jobs board. This worked out extremely well and I recommend trying it. (And thanks to Oganalp Canatan, whom I eventually chose to do the music.)

Happy unicycling! :gentleman:

Your physics. They're horrid.  :facepalm: I'm holding down my right arrow key, my guy is facing right, and he's floating left. What. The game was fairly unplayable because this type of wonky behavior happened so often. I quit after beating level 3 or so.

Also, your level win noise is way too ear-bleeding. The rest of the sound was just right, but the sheer volume and pitch of that noise made me lower my volume significantly. Graphics were decent enough.

Yeah, about that... same behaviour as a real unicycle I think you'll find. The wheel needs to be touching the ground to have any effect! :biglaff:

This now makes hilariously perfect sense. Just fix that one sound :beg:

it feels bad to me that the grappling hook is fired not when i press the button but when i release it

I liked the unicycling physics. It seemed very natural to me. The grappling hook however was very frustrating I gave up trying to use it in the end.

I guess if you were to indicate the trajectory while you held down the space-bar it might make more sense?  But hmm.

Same here. The grappling hook was really hard to use. I couldn't get past the third level as it only fires straight. Also, shouldn't the grappling hook be released as soon as the spacebar is pressed and not when it is released?

As for the Unicycle physics. It took some time to get it but I managed after a few rounds.

Cheers!

This used to be the other way around, but I switched it relatively early in development because retracting or cancelling the hook quickly is really awkward otherwise. Maybe I should have left it alone?


That's appealing for about the first four or five levels... then you realise that most of the time when you fire the hook your character isn't stationary so it would look weird and wouldn't actually help.

There's some really interesting player psychology I've discovered, though: Give people a grappling hook and they really desperately want to aim it. Even if they never actually need to, it really bothers some people a lot that they can't! (Note to self: Bigger focus group next time!)


Ooh, that's a really interesting comment!

So... why were you trying to use the grappling hook on level three? Had you defined custom controls and that gave you the idea?

The reason I ask is: Level three is a propeller tutorial. The hook hasn't been introduced yet!