Athrust

About

Athrust is a single screen puzzle platformer designer for mobile phones in which the player controls a small alien navigating the environment as fast as possible collecting coins along the way.

Design Goals

I aimed to create a simple puzzle platformer with levels that can be quickly read and completed by a player in a few minutes at most to target the casual mobile phone users in any spare moments of time.

To this end I restricted the play area to a single screen per level showing the level goals and making any other mechanics instantly visible to the player starts with simple text prompts when a new one is introduced.

To reinforce the goals of the game I set up a reward system based on the player completing each level in the desired fashion. They receive a star for completion, finishing the level under the target time, and collecting over 80% of the coins on the level.

Process

Thinking in what context the one button input of ‘3Become1‘ would work best I came up with the idea of using it for a platformer on mobile phone, and set about rebuilding the controls from scratch using touch input. In this process I realised the controls felt best when it retained air controls and allowed for more ‘trick shot’ style control like in one level where the player needs to flip direction mid air to then propel themselves onto a platform below.

Once the movement controls were refined I set about creating a range of levels and puzzle types such as gravity flipping, sliding blocks, lock/key interactions, patrolling enemies and teleporters to add twists for the player to navigate.

Post Mortem

‘Athrust’ despite being near completion is still in development due to a hardware crash resulting a corrupted hard drive and poor source control making it hard to recover. This has been an important lesson for me and I’ve since learnt to implement GitHub and Perforce and currently use Perforce in my current project ‘Necropolis Suite‘