UltraTux
10th January - 26th February 2024
Platformer game inspired by SuperTux, which I played a lot of during my childhood. Originally was just a minigame in NoNotParty 2 based off Mario Vs. Luigi. Improved on several shortcomings I thought were present in SuperTux, including:
Terrain System
In SuperTux, the terrain is stored as individual tile IDs, making level creation tedious as you have to select the right tile for every different terrain connection. This has been improved in the more recent versions of the game with automatic tile selection for some terrain types in the editor. UltraTux stores terrain type at each position and then works out what tile to use on level load, which allows adding more tile variety later without having to update levels.
Physics
Main change was improving the sense of speed by adding a dust trail behind Tux while he's running. I also added the ability to rapidly accelerate after ground-pounding which allows you to go fast while doing precise jumps.
Secrets
In SuperTux, each level usually has a couple of secret areas. On level completion, you get shown how many of them you found out of the total. Since the levels are all contributed by the community, these can be quite inconsistent in number and how useful they are to find (not helped by the function of the "Tux Doll" collectible changing significantly between releases). In UltraTux, each level has three Big Coins to collect, and you can see your progress while playing the level and on the level selection screen.