Edit: Update with V1.2 with some control quickfixes, release notes at the bottom of the post.
Download Snowbrawl directly to your OUYA:
Well, it’s that time of year again, hope you’ve got the requisite halls thoroughly decked by now 
Here’s a little seasonal something for ya, a playable mini-game inspired by the 8-bit classic “Hunchback”, starring Hellbounders’ Harmony Winters, free for Windows, OUYA and HTML5. It looks like the OUYA one isn’t going to pass certification in time for Xmas, but you can sideload the file here without any trouble (just download it through the system’s browser in the “make” menu, then “manage > storage > downloads”).
Controls are A,D & Space, or left, right and any button if you’re playing on the microconsole. Hope you enjoy it.
Snowbrawl in HELL
Download OUYA .apk (6MB)
Download Windows .ZIP
Play in Web Browser (HTML5/WebGL Required)
V1.2 Update notes
- Additional control options. Now you can use Cursor keys or WAD to move and jump, or optionally Space or Z to jump as well.
V1.1 Update notes
- Player movement tweaked to be a little faster.
- Fixed bug that was causing fireballs to occasionally fail to fire, also speeded ‘em up a bit.
- Fireballs now fire from cannons with visible “warning” lights & audible cycling.
- Further minor optimisation and tweaks.
I like the idea and the pacing of the game, and it’s a pretty good start. And the graphics style was really good.
However a few things; movement seemed a little too slow as well as the jumping so the controls felt a little too stiff. Some of the fireballs were unavoidable, they would appear after you’d jumped and they seemed to only come at random times also, as you are under time pressure waitng for them to pass was annoying and slowed the game down. Overall I think the game felt too slow, and should have been faster paced. I think this was because of the movement and waiting for fireballs.
Good luck if you continue to work on this and I pressume you skipped this LD?
Hi, thanks for the feedback!
The slow movement was intended to reference the original, which played incredibly slowly by today’s standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mshM2Ddx2Rs . It’s actually quite a bit faster that the old one, but I see your point, it could definitely stand to be sped up a bit. Aside from speeding up movement and jumping, I guess another point would be to speed up the fireballs so they don’t take so long to cross the screen, and maybe include a visual indicator of when they’re going to fire. They’re supposed to fire regularly, but there’s an occasional glitch where they don’t (most noticeable in the HTML5 version), I’ll have to look into that too.
I couldn’t make the LD this time as I was working on another project that didn’t come together in the end, but I really wanted to release something for the Holidays anyway, so I put this together in three days. It could definitely stand a bit of improvement, so genuine thanks for the advice, it’s hard to be objective about these things when you’re rushing to get them done in time for a deadline.
Released an updated version that should address quite a few of your issues, hope you like that one a little better. You were right, the fixes to the fireballs especially make the whole thing feel fairer.
The one major thing I didn’t touch yet was the jumping, which I’m going to keep deliberately stiff for the moment. The whole thing was designed around that slow, fixed-path style of jumping, making it more flexible would require quite a bit of fiddling around to get it all feeling right and not make it trivially easy. I’ll certainly keep it in mind though.
Cheers again for the help, hope you’re having a happy Xmas!
Thanks, the indicator for the fire balls really helps, and now I ‘ve seen what this is based off I quite like the jumping.
Hope you have a good christmas too.