Header image for this project

Bot Bouldering

A challenge awaits. A mountain to be climbed, a wall to be scaled. But your robot won’t do anything without your input, of course!

Draw lines on the paper to tell the robot where to go and how. Pray your sense of scale and spatial proportions didn’t fail you. See your robot bump into enemies halfway the carefully laid plan, doing hopeless somersaults from the wrong position until the battery runs out.

With every mountain conquered … a bigger one awaits with more special pencils, obstacles or enemies.

Have fun!

How to play?

The game has a nice tutorial that explains everything. Just to be sure, here’s a reminder:

  • Click+drag on the canvas to draw lines.
  • Scroll to zoom in/out and select other pencils. (You unlock more pencils as you level up.)
  • Once you’ve used all your pencils (roughly) equally much, the robot starts moving and following the instructions you gave.
  • Collect all stars and arrive at the finish, roughly at the end of your drawn lines, to beat the level. If not, you simply lose a life, but retry from where you are. (If you go out of bounds, you fall off the mountain, and retry from the bottom or hope some obstacle catches you.)

Anything else?

This game is my submission for GMTK Jam 2024 which had the theme Built to Scale. Basically everything went wrong this time (first three ideas weren’t fun/possible at all, then I got sick, then my computer crashed), so I’m just glad I submitted something!

This idea also changed completely like 3 times and I’m certain that the majority of the code in this project is actually a deprecated idea that’s disabled/toggled off at this point.

For example, the stars were introduced to not make it “too easy” (it was just a straight line to the finish at first) … but now that we have different obstacles and pencils and the rule of “finish at the right time”, the game is hard enough as it is and the stars could probably go away. Oh well.

Support

You can hire me! Maybe you need a special board game or video game for a birthday or educational purpose? I'm also open to inquiries about physically publishing my games. I am a registered freelance artist from the Netherlands and you can contact me professionally through my portfolio.

If unsure, visit my Online Store. It contains everything I ever made. Though it focuses on playful education and activities for children/family, first and foremost.

Another great way to support me is to simply let me know what you think! Mail me at harmonize@pandaqi.com with any feedback.

Alternatives would be to buy my paid work (a win-win situation!) or to donate through the most popular channels (see buttons below).