Someone showed me a bug in my recent game, Freefall, whereby you can get as far as you like, by just changing speeds continuously, you don’t even need to look at the screen, just tap with a consistent tempo to keep changing speeds. This works because the projectile speeds are set with integers which means they have:
- A base speed at which they will hit you with the parachute
- Fast (double base) speed they will you with if in free fall
- Anything faster than this will miss you because it will get off the screen before it reaches you and is therefore only in there for decoration / to confuse the player
I used integers for practically everything in the game because the low resolution meant that even moving one pixel at a time is a pretty big step (there are only 48px in the vertical axis) and you can’t draw smaller than that.
During testing I focussed on checking that 1 & 2 would hit you at their respective speeds and that you could dodge them if you changed at the last moment. If you change speeds so infrequently the problem is less apparent. Continue reading