Penguin Panic

'Penguin Panic' is a survival, dodge 'em style game where your score is equal to the seconds survived.  The overall goal is to keep the penguin alive controlling him with your left or right arrow keys on your keyboard. The snow ball size and angles they fall at, are random. The speed at which they fall is a set constant, however snow balls spawn at an exponential rate with frequency of spawned objects set to scale/increase (after 20 seconds) with how many seconds the player has been alive acting as a natural difficulty multiplier.

It's a complete concept, but ultimately it's a gameplay design that has a skill/entertainment ceiling. I usually design mobile games, and designing for desktop means I get to experiment with having different input sources. So I added a memory game of Simon says in the form of a Christmas tree that has light up ornaments. That half of the game relies on the mouse inputs to repeat the patterns that grows longer and longer. These inputs are recognised in tandem with controlling the penguin, dodging the snowballs. 

The difficulty of the game is now two fold. Showcasing two kinds of a scaling difficulty that increases with the length of game time. I wanted to incorporate a forgiving game design, so the ornament Simon says sequencing only starts once the player clicks on the button at the base of the tree. If the player gets the sequence wrong, it will update the highscore above the tree if applicable (right next to the 'current score text'), otherwise it will play a "wrong" sound effect and require the the player to restart the sequence. This is a lot more forgiving in the sense that you only have to start that part of the game if you choose to challenge yourself and unlike the other half of the game, making an error and the penguin being hit results in perma-death and a game over screen.

Given more time I think I would sit down and draw up an equation of how I could combine the score (seconds survived) from the penguin surviving and combine it with the highscore (length of sequence) from the Simon says ornament game. But as it stands I really wanted to provide two different challenging game concepts that scale the longer you play, and avoid the design choices of something like Chess Boxing, where if you lose in one aspect of the event, you lose overall.