June #1GAM Entry: Dark Horse

So despite my efforts, I wasn’t able to finish the game I’ve been working on all month for June’s One Game a Month project.

So I took a good chunk of Saturday to make an entirely different game instead.

I’ll continue working on Shipwrecked for July, but Dark Horse is a very simple racing game that I managed to get done in less than four hours.

Download Dark Horse for Linux 64-bit (362 kb tar.gz file)

It was originally a Zero Hour Game Jam project from last November that I never finished. It started out with a very simple rendering of a horse that can jump.

I then added hurdles and birds as obstacles, a clock, and a previous best time to beat for the challenge:

The still images don’t show the horses legs spinning in place, and when the horse jumps, it looks pretty frantic.

Hitting obstacles slows you down and prevents you from making your best time. You need to jump over the hurdles on the ground while avoiding the birds, which fly up and down in the air.

Each race has a random collection of obstacles. I thought about adding collectables to give the player more incentive to get in the air to make the birds a bit more dangerous, but then I thought about giving rewards for collecting all of the items, and unfortunately my game development time is up for this weekend.

Dark Horse is not polished, but it feels good to get this old project to a completed state.

And next month, I hope to deliver the ambitious Shipwrecked. I’ve already dedicated 23 hours to it, and another month might be enough. B-)