Hometime

Don't Get Wet

3:45pm. The school bell rings. The sky which had remained clear, blue and cloudless for the whole day suddenly turns to grey and the ‘tears of mother nature’ begin to fall. 

Of course, you are a smart student and you remembered to bring your raincoat… oh, wait, you forgot it. Oh well, better ‘run like fun’, dodging every single rain drop and jumping over every puddle, stream and river in order to remain dry.

Hometime is an arcade game in which you play as a school student who can run, jump and crouch to avoid rain drops. Each time you are hit, your ‘wetness level’ increases and when it reaches 100%, it’s Game Over. There are also a number of puddles/streams/rivers to jump over. I am not quite sure what they are meant to be? But it’s water and that is what you are trying to avoid. (Although please, drink plenty)

The controls to the game are lazily pasted on the home screen but they are pretty much what you would expect. 

‘A’ or left arrow to move left

‘D’ or right arrow to move right

‘W’, up arrow or spacebar to move jump

‘S’, down arrow or shift to crouch

The esc key to pause

‘R’ or backspace to reset

And you can press spacebar or enter to proceed through menus (although there are very few of those!)

Hometime is my third and final game of the summer. It was created for the olcCodeJam 2022, and was created in 8 days from the 27th of August to the 4th of September, although I was working full time most of the days and I had a lot to do on the second weekend so there was not much time for creating games. I had planned so much more for Hometime, for instance, I was going to add a parallax scrolling background with a city skyline, with background ambient rain. Along with that I was going to add sounds and music like I usually do but I unfortunately just ran out of time.

The game was created in C and utilised the raylib library which was a great help for providing functions for doing the really tedious stuff. It also allowed me to compile it to WebAssembly using the emscripten SDK. This is the first time I have compiled anything to WebAssembly. So far, it has been an easy and painless experience and it is definitely much easier to distribute games this way rather than through an unsigned exe. 

Despite the game lacking any sort of unique charm and atmosphere (and graphics and gameplay etc etc..) I have learned a lot more about programming in C and coding in general which was the sole reason as to why I have been entering game/ code jams over the summer.