Endless Runners

The second Low-Level Programming coursework is to make an endless runner, so I'm going to look at some of the most popular endless runners as well as those that I've enjoyed the most and try and think about what it was about them that I (or other people) liked and disliked. Then I will look at what is common across all the games and some ideas I can consider to make my game unique.

Temple Run

I think that what made this game significant was the simple but widely varied way in which the player controlled the avatar. Even though the game was on mobile there were six different things that the player had to do, each of which were relatively intuitive and therefore easy to remember (for example swiping left turned the player left). There were also upgrades that players could buy between games to get them better scores on their next/all future games.
Temple run is the first endless runner I remember being popular on mobiles, so I think a lot of its success could be due to it being a relatively new genre for mobile games.

Jetpack Joyride

What made Jetpack Joyride stand out was that it had less focus on which controls to use at which moments, the only control in the game was to tap the screen. By default tapping would make the player go up, while releasing would make them fall down and the player would have to navigate a 2D endless side-scrolling world. The player could also ride vehicles which were controlled difficulty, but still just using tapping and releasing. Like Temple Run the game had upgrades that could be bought between games to improve performance in future games.
I think that the mechanic of improving the player between plays can be quite detrimental in the long term as the player can reach a point where there's nothing worthwhile left to unlock.

Flappy Bird

I think the most notable thing about Flappy Bird was that the game didn't seem to get more difficult as the player progressed, which is very uncommon in endless runner games. I think the thing that initially kept drawing me into the game was that it seemed like it should have been easier than it was. The controls were simple and easy to get to grips with, and the spaces through which the bird had to pass were much larger than the bird, but I kept dying with a score of around 2 or 3, and every time I loaded the game back up it was because I thought I should have done better than I did.
Unfortunately the lack of difficulty scaling was also the reason I stopped playing the game, as once I had a good rhythm of how to make it through the obstacles, my score started to get considerably higher, and I would often only die when I got tired of playing, which took away any enjoyment I got from the game.

Robot Unicorn Attack

Robot Unicorn Attack was quite a novelty game. It had a robot unicorn, rainbows and a 1980s one-hit wonder as a soundtrack. It is the only game I remember being popular on PC rather than just on mobile.

Fire Rides

Fire Rides has the player swing on ropes instead of running, and they die if they touch the ground or ceiling. I quite like it as a game, but don't really like the app as it's saturated with ads, and the 3D nature of the game means that it is quite intensive to run on a phone and will drain the battery.

Crossy Road

In crossy road the player could unlock new skins from a 'prize machine' which gives the player a skin at random, including those they've already gotten, meaning that the more you have, the less likely you are to get a new one.