It's been a couple days since I first released Glide. As of now, it currently sits as the highest rated game I've made to date (3.41 vs. Bounce Canyon's 3.35). Even though it wasn't frontpaged like Bounce Canyon was, I'd say the response to it has been pretty strong. And I'm glad it has! The funny thing is, Glide could have been a completely different game.

Development started around a month ago. About a month prior I had finished development of my previous game, Froggy Adventure, which I had been working on for close to half a year. I was pretty burned out, so I wanted to make something pretty simple for my next game. My idea? A Tiny Wings-esque racing game.

Thus, the hills. It took a fair amount of trial and error, but eventually I had a nice algorithm to generate a nice, hilly terrain in Pico-8.

However, I quickly ran into a problem: I suddenly remembered that Tiny Wings already had a multiplayer racing mode. I didn't just want to make a worse Tiny Wings, so I instead tried to come up with ways to utilize the new hill algorithm in a game.

One such idea I had was a one-button game where the hills were instead the ceiling, and you used a whip to swing around underneath. However, I became inspired by the "up-down" nature of the hills to experiment with some sort of gliding mechanic. Thus, Glide was born.

From there things were mostly uneventful. I opted to keep the minimalist style of the demo, as I felt the game needed clarity for which direction the glider was going in. Most of the development time at this point was about fine-tuning player physics and controls. The physics are probably what I'm most proud of- there's a lot of nuance to how the player controls, and it's very fun to zip through a tight area.

The movement actually directly inspired the second gamemode, Sprint. It felt fun to go fast, so the natural step to me was to introduce a mode solely about going fast. As a small aside, the difficulty in this mode actually ramps up faster than it does in Endless. The gap between the floor and the ceiling is as follows for Endless:

flr(80 - sqrt(12*hill_count))

And for Sprint:

flr(80 - sqrt(20*(hill_count+1)))

The music in the game was loosely inspired by Bomberman Hero's "Redial," though frankly I'm not a very good musician, so I don't think I came close to matching the style I wanted for the game. That said, some people have said that they liked the music, so maybe I didn't do too bad.

And with that, I don't really have much else to say about this game. If you'd like to catch up more on the games that I make, feel free to follow me on my Twitter, where I post a lot more.