The 10 Second Foot
"The 10 Second Foot" foot as in length not an actual foot, is a game where you are a snail, and you are trying to break a world record by Archie(world famous snail). The current world record is a foot in 20. Not only will you break the world record, you believe you can double it as Archie once did and travel 1 foot in less than 10 seconds. Based on the true story of Archie a actual world record holder, and a source that the fastest snail travels 0.9 feet in 20 seconds.
note the HTML 5 version doesn't work very well the menu is a bit glitchy where it presses a button when you hover over it
I can complete the game I think so I will include it, if you want to play quickly I think the embed is there and works, else the installer is there too. :)
A few notes on the game (list of keybinds are in a menu but I'll also write them here):
 press the "Escape" key to quit the game at anytime
 press the "R" key for a quick restart of the race when in the race
 to move the muscles underneath your snail press the homerow keys from right to left "ASDFGHJKL;"
 press the "Space" key to enter and leave your shell both on ground and midair
  note:
   if you leave your shell midair, you spread out and slow yourself down, which can help you control where you
   land
   if you enter your shell midair, after leaving midair, you can speed up the rate that you fall and you can keep
   that momentum by rolling in a curve (being in your shell while in the curve)
 press the "I" key to dash horizontally when walking on the ground, you get a new dash every 10 seconds :)
 in menus wasd and arrow keys and clicking buttons works
 the debug setting show information about speed and dashes and what the game knows about what is happening
 also the timer is not entirely accurate it is slowed down by 40 percent so a game you can complete in 10 second but
 also the track is not a foot long, only two inaccuracies to make the game more fun
my current pb: 554 frames or steps, 9.23 seconds
note the HTML 5 version doesn't work very well the menu is a bit glitchy where it presses a button when you hover over it
I can complete the game I think so I will include it, if you want to play quickly I think the embed is there and works, else the installer is there too. :)
A few notes on the game (list of keybinds are in a menu but I'll also write them here):
 press the "Escape" key to quit the game at anytime
 press the "R" key for a quick restart of the race when in the race
 to move the muscles underneath your snail press the homerow keys from right to left "ASDFGHJKL;"
 press the "Space" key to enter and leave your shell both on ground and midair
  note:
   if you leave your shell midair, you spread out and slow yourself down, which can help you control where you
   land
   if you enter your shell midair, after leaving midair, you can speed up the rate that you fall and you can keep
   that momentum by rolling in a curve (being in your shell while in the curve)
 press the "I" key to dash horizontally when walking on the ground, you get a new dash every 10 seconds :)
 in menus wasd and arrow keys and clicking buttons works
 the debug setting show information about speed and dashes and what the game knows about what is happening
 also the timer is not entirely accurate it is slowed down by 40 percent so a game you can complete in 10 second but
 also the track is not a foot long, only two inaccuracies to make the game more fun
my current pb: 554 frames or steps, 9.23 seconds
Comments18
In addition, I really liked the concept of the game and your interpretation of the theme, one of the best I've seen
The problem is the qwerty layout was hardcoded.
One idea I had was the ability to set your own keybinds in the settings menu, but the problem is I intentionally didn't want to do that because you can set the g and h keys to something easier like space and another thumb key. I made the decision early on that the location of the g and h keys was significant in the simulation of being a snail.
Another idea I had which I would probably do next time is hardcoding a few popular layouts like dvorak and colmak since the location of the keys was important, or maybe importing a list of layouts.
When I was thinking about this during the jam I didn't see and still don't see a way where a non-qwerty layout user can't temporarily switch to qwerty when playing ludum dare games, as I do and did during testing. So I decided to take that hit and prioritize other things. But I did give another game a criticism of not being alt layout friendly, The situation might not have applied because it required familiarity with where keys on qwerty were. It was about a goldfish and I struggled because qwop was the controls which would swap and change requiring you to have familiarity with the layout itself. I don't think this applies to my game because from my understanding the difference would be when starting my game you would just need to read about how the position of the keys relate to the controls. An example of position relating to controls: wasd being directional where W is above S and D is to the right of A rather than needing to know how to type W A S in qwerty. I will try to think of a good solution. Currently I would probably import a ton of selectable popular layouts next time.
Occasionally I've run into games that seem to be layout-agnostic, so that "Q" in the game represents the top-left keyboard button, even if you're using a Dvorak keyboard. Not sure how it's done, and I'm sure it depends on your engine/programming language of choice. That's my preferred solution, if possible.