Rainy Day

WASD to move, Space to jump, J to evaporate water, or if your cloud is stormy, press J to call a thunderbolt

 Make sure you turn your volume up before playing!

Rainy Day was a 3-day game jam style project I did at the Tisch Summer High School Game Design Program 2023. All students in the program were randomly assigned an image and tasked with developing a platformer where the player’s movement felt like the image. My image was a picture of a lightning bolt. I chose to emulate a thunderstorm with my gameplay by creating the feeling of peaceful rain with the occasional chaotic burst of lightning. I did this by primarily having slow and calm gameplay broken up with bursts of intense speed and power. 

When starting development on Rainy Day, I was pretty lost on what my main mechanic would be. Lots of games have incredibly well done electricity mechanics, so I wanted to think outside the box for how I incorporated it in my game. For inspiration, I watched a video about how thunderclouds work in real life. This gave me the idea to have the player evaporate water in order to grow their cloud, until it is big enough to form lightning. Incorporating and modifying real world systems to work in a game was a very interesting challenge and I plan on looking at existing systems in the real world as inspiration in the future.

 If granted more time to work on this project, I would build on pre-existing mechanics as well as tweak the difficulty of the game. While happy with the main mechanic of evaporating and storing water, I would love to build on it by having a variety of a way you could use the water, instead of just using it to create thunderbolts. The game was a bit too difficult due to the slipperiness of the platforms as well as flawed level design. To combat this issue, I would increase deceleration when on platforms, as well as increasing jump height.