Quadrilactic

Quadrilactic is a simple browser based game about a quadrilateral that has gone intergalactic. You control a little square trying to jump through space (upwards on the screen), bouncing and jumping off a little platform that flies up towards you as you climb.

Looking through my Github repositories I can see a load of haf-finished projects, where I had big ideas but not enough patience and commitment to see the development through to the end. Quadrilactic was my attempt to see the development of a game project through from start to finish. To make this achievable I scaled the scope way back.

The gameplay is programmed in TypeScript and renders to a HTML canvas element. I created the (very simple) graphics myself in Paint.NET, and I pulled sound assets from BFXR and OpenGameArt.

The gameplay was partly inspired by doodle-jump. The portrait orientation lends itself to the vertical gameplay, and I had plans to implement tilt controls for mobile, although these never materialised.

The gameplay is really challenging, as the comments on itch.io confirm. Part of the difficulty of the game is that the platform (which you need to bounce on) disappears off-screen, only to return at increasingly high speeds. This gives you smaller and smaller windows of time to make a corrective jump and keep climbing.

Despite the incredible simple design, its nice to have seen a game through from start to a complete finished state. In particular, I'm pleased with some of the "juicy" details I managed to include:

• Parallax scrolling stars in the background.
• The happy little face on the player, that changes as it bounces.
• The transparent trails on the player and platform.
• Inclusion of sounds for audio feedback.