email: clune.nathan@gmail.com

PREMISE

In a world populated by colorful jelly bean people, you are the only citizen who wields two fully-articulated hands (rather large ones at that). This also means you’re well-equipped to do your job of completing minor construction tasks. Truly, you are the handyman in every sense of the word.

Today your job takes place on a colorful playground, with structures made of turf and of wood. At the top of the wooden tower, one area has large nails sticking out of the ground. Since this is obviously a safety hazard, a concerned parent calls upon you to pound the nails all the way in. Pounding the nails is a trivial task, so the objective of the game is essentially to reach the top of the wooden tower. The wooden tower may have the only objective, there are several different routes to get to the top which make use of the entire playground.

CONTROLS

Aside from the ARROW KEYS or WASD which are used to move along the ground, there are two other keys which are used to control the character. It doesn’t matter what they are, so I’ll use A and B as placeholders.

A: Jump It’s a jump, exactly as you would expect. While grounded, press the A button to set the vertical speed to a fixed positive number. However, the jump height is pathetic, so you’ll mostly have to walk through the environment to make progress. This is also intended to prevent the game from becoming about skill-intensive platforming.

B: Pound If the B button is pressed while the handyman is standing still, he pounds the ground in front of him with both hands. This can be used to activate several interactive objects in the level, including the nails which mark the goal. During this animation, the hands scale up even further to emphasize the pounding action. This will look very strange.

B: Dive If the B button is pressed while the handyman is walking or airborne, he performs a dive. This gives him a large horizontal boost and a slight vertical boost, adding fixed numbers to his vertical and horizontal velocities. Once the dive is used, it cannot be used again until landing on the ground.

INTERACTIVE OBJECTS AND NPCS

Seesaw Rules:

• Standing on either side of the seesaw will drag that side on down.
• Pounding either side of the seesaw will also drag that side down.
• If you pound one side while standing on the other, the seesaw catapults you up and towards the direction you were facing.

Bouncy Surface Rules:

• You can simply walk across it
• You can jump off of it normally
• If you fall onto it, you bounce up as high as where you fell from. (invert y-velocity)
• A pound is equivalent to landing from a much higher height
• A dive is equivalent to landing normally
• When you bounce off a bouncy surface, your horizontal momentum is unaffected.

Concerned Parent:

• When you walk within a certain radius of her for the first time, a small alert icon appears above her head. You don’t have to talk to her but it’ll be obvious that you’re supposed to.
• When you talk to her, she tells you to pound the nails at the top of the wooden tower. The camera moves to show you what she’s talking about during one of her lines.

Seesaw Kid:

• Sits on one side of the first accessible seesaw.
• When you talk to her, she tells you to give her a boost.
• Standing on the other side is impossible, since it’s too high to jump onto.
• Pounding the other side sends her flying, demonstrating what would happen if you pounded the seesaw while standing on it.

Slide Kid:

• You can only talk to him from behind.
• He stands at the top of the slide, preventing you from walking up.
• When you talk to him, he says that he’s too scared to go down the slide, and asks you to give him a push. This disables your ability to talk to him.
• Now you are able to use POUND on him, which either pushes him down the slide gently or sends him flying, I haven’t decided yet. Either way, this enables you to walk up the slide as a shortcut.

Later in development, I’ll probably throw some other NPCs in just to make the world feel less empty, but they won’t have any special behaviors other than saying a line or running around.

Trees (Stretch Goal): Trees would be a perfect fit for the playground scene, and I do plan to include them in my world to some extent, I just don’t know how interactive they should be. Climbing trees would make perfect sense for a small character with giant hands, but it also adds another action for the player character. I imagine the programming required for this would be more complicated than anything else currently in the game. My plan is to save this feature for last, and build the rest of the game with the knowledge that it might have to be scrapped.

CONCEPT SKETCHES

REFERENCE IMAGES