Jumpman

The concept of Jumpman is to take all the things that have become possible in games in the last 29 years-- physics, 45 degree angles, a z axis-- and bring the new technology into an early-80s-style platformer while at the same time changing the platformers basic nature as little as possible. The hope is to try to make you believe that every 2600-era platformer would have looked like this if only youd pulled the camera back about 4 feet. Like, every old game had something where you could walk off one side of the screen and suddenly appear on the other, right? What was actually happening there? Did space in the world where Pac-Man lives just happen to loop back on itself every ten feet? What would happen if you just took the camera and turned it a little bit to the right, would you see Pac-Man duplicated every 10 feet stretching off into the distance forever...?

The gameplay in Jumpman is, as the premise would suggest, pretty standard for a 2D platformer (although, about as hard as I could make it) but there are a few new mechanics added that are hopefully fun. Most of these have to do with exploring the idea of taking a single "level" from a platformer and trying to bring out all the possibilities latent in it, thinking, if you just jostle the components or look at it from a different angle it becomes something totally different. Like, if you think about it, the levels in these games were basically just abstract blocks-- in the days before those fancy-schmancy tiles there was nothing really to distinguish wall from ceiling. You could take a level map from one of those games, hold it sideways or upside down, and half the time youd have an equally valid level map.

So, Jumpman outright lets you do that. There are controls to "turn the world" in the middle of play and rotate things such that the walls become floors and ceilings. In a lot of levels you have to do this to progress. Theres some neat things you can do with this, like sorta you can walljump by just tilting the wall just enough to get footing on it.

Features include: old-school puzzle platforming with some twists; low-definition graphics; gamepad support; and a full-level editor.