It’s official, Run! Run! Don’t Die! is out now! After some time cooking on the back burner, we believe that the re—release of Run! Run! Don’t Die! (R2D2) is ready for the limelight! R2D2 is a speed runner built off of the inspiration and archetype provided by the classic platform games from the golden age of gaming.

When R2D2 was initially released, the game utilized an online high score board. This scoreboard was unfortunately lost during a backend transition of our systems.

The re-release of R2D2 fixes all of that and then some, restoring Run Run to its former fun, competitive glory! Checking the leaderboard is easy, either on the Run Run web page or in-game on the home screen. You may query for additional high scores on the Discord server as part of the new feature roll out.

That’s not all the new bells and whistles added, we’ve experimented and added some features to the Discord integration. One such integration is an alert when a new high score is submitted. Whenever a new competitive entry is published to the leaderboard, an alert will be sent to the members of The Indie Discord  which includes the player’s name and current score!

Finally, we have added the capability to expand the life of the game through seasons. At this moment, seasons will only take a snapshot of the high scores within a given time period. In the future we plan on changing up the levels for additional competitiveness!

We hope you enjoy this release of Run Run as much as we have. Please join our Discord and challenge those on the leaderboard. Besides, if you manage to dethrone the current champion, there is even a custom Discord role you can win!

The post Run! Run! Don’t Die! Out Now! appeared first on The Indie Accord.

The difficulty obviously limited our audience a little, so we had to be careful about how we designed the game. We knew the game was going to be short, so our first idea was to require the level to be done in one shot. However, we quickly realized that this would be extremely difficult, and would reduce the chance anyone would finish the game. Our solution was to have 3 checkpoints that didn’t affect your time score. This let the player save some progress, but each time they died the timer would keep counting, so if you could do the whole game without dying you would have a higher spot on the leaderboard.

However, even this was hard. After some early testing and feedback from the community, we finally came up with the solution. We would split the game into an easy and hard mode. In the easy mode each big obstacle for followed by a checkpoint so that the player would only have to learn it once. This avoided forcing the player to rerun obstacles that they already knew in order to even attempt the new obstacles. Then, after they had beaten this mode and figured out how the obstacles worked, they were able to run the harder mode. Only the hard mode allows access to the highscore table. In this mode we added native split support (something common in speed runs). This means you can see exactly how many frames each section took you, and improve on your movement as you iterate. In order to make these speedruns truly fair we had to take out all randomness in the game, which sounds easier than it is. This means that every ghost, spike, and slime had to be in the exact same location and have the exact same speed the first time you see it. This allows the player to get consistently better at the game. One of these speedruns can be seen in the youtube video below:

We wanted to develop the game quickly as an exercise, so visually we went with a premade asset pack (https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-donation) for the background and focused on creating a solid and well animated character. These animations are part of what make the character feel so solid to control. It is very satisfying to watch the character jump, throw the hat, then front flip to the hat and continue the movement all while being 100% under your control.

We learned a lot about difficulty based on user feedback during the testing phase. We learned how to use difficulty to lengthen the game without making it artificially hard and painful to play. We also learned how to quickly develop and iterate an idea into something fun and playable very quickly. We are happy with letting run run be a little game that we used to learn, and a little friendly platformer with some friendly competition on the leaderboards.

The post Run Run Retrospective appeared first on The Indie Accord.

• Bugfixes
• Improved Animations
• Added an Easy and a Hard mode to gameplay.
• Added an additional checkpoint to help break up the score.
• Added a new animation for the main player.
• Updated the game’s music
• Added a menu to the game
• New ghastly effect when the player dies.

All thanks to player and LPer feedback!

If you think you have what it takes to get on the leader-board, check it out!
Download
Leader board

Feel free to watch and follow (and compete with) the Let’s Players who have been playing Run Run!

The post Run Run Don’t Die Update appeared first on The Indie Accord.

Run! Run! v 1.1

• Added an Easy and a Hard mode to gameplay.
• Added an additional checkpoint to help break up the score.
• Added a new animation for the main player.
• Updated the game’s music
• Added a menu to the game
• New ghastly effect when the player dies.

We hope you continue to enjoy Run! Run! and as always, we are listening for feedback or recommendations

Check it out on GameJolt and Itch.io!

Online Highscores!

The post Run! Run! 1.1 Released appeared first on The Indie Accord.