Ascension (WIP)

Ascension is a free little casual indie game in development I'm working on.

What you need to do in this game is climb as far as you can. The game consists of floors - "Stages" - which are created by the users themselves.

Creating stages is an easy and fast proccess and so is sharing them. I'm planning to create an online distribution platform for levels that will be integrated with the game's interface so people will be able to share them in an instant. Think of it as of twitter - levels are short and arranged by authors and tags. In a single play of Ascension where you reach floor 47 before running out of time, you actually played levels created by (appx) 47 different authors in less than 4 minutes!

Here's a small sneak peak:

I would love to know your opinions.

Look's challenging, fast paced and fairly difficult, I might give it a shot.

I like it! Cool style and color palette! Creating a new level appears to be simple indeed. I guess the sequence in which player must jump on the cubes depends on the letters? am I right?

That's cool man. Is the game loading the next level as you climb the ladder? How are you doing that? I'd actually quite like to know how people handle entering different levels/rooms in a level, because I just create different layouts for every room but I've always suspected that's not the most efficient way of handling large games.

First of all, thanks for the positive replies guys!

LavaWave, thanks alot.

nowon Actually no, it has nothing to do with the letters but that's a nice idea I will consider.

CrudeMik thank you very much. Yes, it loads the next level while climbing the ladder. Besides the special bonus screens which contain special event handling, every stage is loaded into the same layout.

<img src="http://up203.siz.co.il/up1/hndmymmmlnj2.png">

After the player finishes the level, when he reaches the X in the drawing, he is transfered back down and the next level is loaded. The levels are saved in external files.

And using many layouts is sometimes efficient: In game with predetermined environments, such as Point & Click, exploration games, RPGs, and such, it is not such a bad idea to use different layouts for each area. But in arcade games or more simple ones, with simple or dynamic levels, creating a map syntax for loading maps off external files is prefered. In my case I use the latter, but in another game I used to work on (a failure of an exploration-platformer) I used a different layout for each and every environment, with a couple of core spritesheets for inclusion.

Thank you, that cleared a lot of things up - Yeah game looks fun I look forward to playing it, drop me an E-Mail when it's out to - and I'll feature a review or mention it on my sites homepage.

nowon Actually no, it has nothing to do with the letters but that's a nice idea I will consider.

well gameplay looks fun even without "letter-based" jumping

And I join other guys in the thread looking forward to play it

nice game, but i was wondering if you could use newgrounds music in it....is it allowed/legal??

nice game, but i was wondering if you could use newgrounds music in it....is it allowed/legal??

Actually, yes, it is. All music uploaded to Newgrounds is under the Creative Commons licence. I can use it freely under three conditions: 1. Give the maker credits for the piece. 2. Share my work noncommercially, 3. Share my creation under the same licenece.

If I will ever plan on selling the game (which now I don't. Perhaps if I'll ever port it to the iPhone or something like that) I will either make an agreement with the artists under another licence, or replace their pieces.

As for the game - it is nearly done. All I have to do is some debugging and beta testing, and finish building the online distribution platform. One thing, though; I might postpone the distribution platform release until I will have the funds to buy a host.