Amy Zing

It only took Ant a few days to include my little \”Amy Zing\” sprites into his neat labyrinth crawler homebrew, actually. For some reason, I completely missed it by then (March \’18) and only realised that the game was released thanks to some anonymous internet folk who followed a link from simian zombie web site to mine, leaving a mark into the logging system which I tracked backwards to hit the page with the release.

So I grabbed the game, enjoyed it, enjoyed again, tried the various resolutions (normal is my favourite one) and smiled: that was my first ever homebrew collab as a spriter ^_^. And then started to wonder… Could such simple labyrinths work for Bilou, under gravity ?

I traced some of them in a notebook and started to check where I would put collectibles or hazards and why. In a platformer, you shouldn\’t (imho) try to make your labyrinth with individual blocks, because the player will need some room to manoeuver. If I pick 4×3 Bilou-sized blocks as a \”maze cell\” (3 blocks being a standard jump height), the maze now scrolls over 4×3 screens. You can no longer plan your move easily with that limited visibility, so you\’ll end up more often in dead ends and will have to back-track. Hence the rewards and hazards.

And well, Imho, with properly tuned jump distances and some wall-kick mechanics, you might not even need fancy ladders or similar tricks to support those labyrinths.

That\’s not quite \”infinite pyramid\”, but it could be a nice step towards it.

edit: good news: my 5-year-old J.L.N wasn\’t afraid of the half-dead monkey and accepted the maze game as something to do when he\’s bored.