Obstacle Climbing Bastard

Not sure why there’s a bit of a gray halo on some of the letters there – maybe they were oddly offset in the .swf, or there’s some sizing issue.

Anyway, this was our first Flash game!  Eggciting.  Here’s some jibber we wrote on our old website, ’cause we’re lazy:

It started from me playing around making Flash animations and finding out how to do a very simple pixel animation, and then lead to me spending a week or so of very late nights making this thing.

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I’m pretty proud of it, although it was a bit of a mistake making level 6 near impossible. (I made a funky wee end sequence and everything for when you get a perfect score, but the chances of anyone ever achieving that are very slight.)

Also:

‘Obstacle Climbing Bastard’ is a game where you climb obstacles and it’s a bit of a bastard.

The controls are as simple as can be – one button, just the spacebar. Press it too early, you die. Don’t press it in time, you die. Press it in time, you live to climb again. (Press T on the title screen to play a quick tutorial that explains it all.)

And that’s it! Simplistic in design and in graphics, the stark pixel art harks back to a time when games were harsh. And that was the idea – for it to be psychotically unforgiving. But fair.

It’s an incredibly quick-play game – to play it to completion would only take a handful of minutes. And most are very unlikely to get that far…

There’s no sound. I think the silence adds to (or, rather, music and sound would detract from) the stark, puritan nature of thing. And, of course, it means you don’t have to worry about any sudden beeping giving you away at work.

It was inspired jointly by the glorious rhythm game fun of ‘Rhythm Tengoku’ (‘Obstacle Climbing Bastard’ is kind of a silent rhythm game, if you will,) and the insane yet brilliant purity and hostility of ’1942′. It’s in that spirit, and I hope it finds its audience of honest, belligerent masochists. Enjoy!

Top secret behind the scenes info: it’s basically an animation.  At the appropriate bits, it listens for the button being pressed.  Too early, it stops the anim and overlays the penguin; too late, it stops the anim and overlays the death anim.  The ActionScript is basic, it’s not very streamlined, and really takes advantage of using Flash as a visual design and navigation and animation program rather than a programming thing.

Anyway, voila.