Super Nut Jump

Growing up, my first experience with video games was the Atari 2600. So when we were thinking of new concepts, I thought it would be cool to reboot one of the games that was pivotal to my early development as a video game nerd: Circus.

Atari Circus

By today’s standards, Circus is a very simple game. Similar to Breakout, your goal is to pop 3 rows of balloons by bouncing clowns off a seesaw. If you clear a row, you get bonus points, a fun sound effect, and a new row. The goal of the game is to get as high of a score as you can.

One thing to note is that my mom is very competitive, and Circus was her favorite game. We would play this and other games every night and she never went easy on me. Of course, over time I got better at the game and kicked her butt! One could say the apprentice became the master I think that this sort of high score chasing is perfect for mobile, where you don’t always have a ton of time, but want to engage in quick burst games. Hopefully, others will agree.

We gave ourselves 2 months to make a playable game, and another 2 months to make it fun and polished. Will Gallagher handled the art, Drew Nicolo the programming, and Yuzun and I helped with design. This is Drew’s first programming credit, as he is our Technical Artist… I drafted him to this project after I played a Galaga clone he had made to demo our new tech.

Old Circus Concept

During development, we struggled with the Circus theme, especially the clowns. It was nostalgic, but didn’t really excite us. Will created a Circus bear character to replace the clowns and make the game cuter. I thought they looked a little like chipmunks. Thinking about chipmunks, led to the idea that Squirrel’s trying to grab nuts would be a lot more fun… and Super Nut Jump was born.

Super Nut Jump

Along the way, we replaced the seesaw with a trampoline, added bombs falling from the sky, and a timer so that it is more “blitzy”. The biggest change came when we decided to make it vertical instead of horizontal. This was done for two reasons, we wanted the squirrel to jump higher and stay in the air longer, and we discovered that sweeping your finger across a wide screen led to “finger drag”. The drag was causing a couple problems: 1.) the longer you went without taking your finger off the screen, the more it pulled at your skin, slowing your movement and making it uncomfortable 2.) taking your finger off the screen and putting it back would cause the trampoline to jump to the new finger position. Making the game vertical solves those problems.

We’re going to submit the Flash version of this game to game portals and the mobile version to publishers. I am looking forward to seeing the feedback that we get and will let you all know when and where it is released.