Another day, another dollar...
You're late! In this infinite jumper inspired by Franz Kafka's novella, The Metamorphosis, play as cockroach Gregor Samsa trying to get to work after being mysteriously turned into a bug. This project is the third iteration of Metamorphosis-inspired games I've created.
[click to view previous iterations]
Iteration 1: Bitsy
The first was a simple experimentation with Bitsy created as a 1-week project for my Games, Glitches, and Creativity course. I got a positive reaction from my professor and it inspired me to continue my exploration of classic literature and video games.
Iteration 2: Pygame
The second iteration of this project was Samsa Spring, the final for my Creative Coding course, where I learned how to use Python and Python libraries. I decided to create a simple infinite jumper, a metaphor for the demanding, never-ending climb of capitalism that dehumanized Gregor to the point of turning into a cockroach. This exercise was beneficial in helping me grasp Pygame and using Python in game development; before this, I had only ever programmed games in C#. However, I felt constrained by Pygame and knew I wanted to revisit this idea later.
Iteration 3: Get to Work!
A semester later, Get to Work! was created as a 4-week solo project for my Senior Thesis Development course. The assignment was to make anything we were interested in exploring for our potential thesis. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to iterate on my Metamorphosis infinite jumper.
I was also inspired by the song Cockroach Mentality by Gun; I wanted to experiment with BandLab and sound design to create an 8-bit, arcade version of the song to go with my game.
In this version, I added enemies, which is Gregor's manager demanding that he gets to work and scolding him for slacking. If you hit your manager, you die and the game is over. However, if you dash into them instead, then your manager dies, and you can hit the dash again to get an upward boost. Another mechanic I implemented in this version is collecting money and a paywall. This started as a joke with my professor but I ended up adding it; it received positive feedback from my peers, as it added a new incentive and made the gameplay more rouge-like.
One goal of this project was to develop it for mobile, which I unfortunately didn't get to during the span of the 4-week project. However, I plan to iterate on this project further and eventually make it available for mobile download.