Ice Hopping

Ice hopping is a vertical jumping game in which a single player controls a penguin and attempts to navigate across a sea of icebergs without falling off and becoming submerged in freezing water. Inspired by the game “Island Hopping”, the penguin constantly moves forward at a constant velocity, with the player limited to controlling the penguin by turning left or right and by jumping (as well as double jumping). All movement is controlled via the mouse.

Levels are procedurally generated in chunks, with each chunk consisting of islands procedurally generated islands randomly chosen from a pool of five different models. Each island also has a randomized color assigned to it – either white, gray or black. Landing on a platform will mark that platformed as already landed on by changing its color to green. Furthermore, landing on multiple platforms in a row will increment a combo counter, which will increase the number of points the player gains when landing on the next island. This starts at 1 point, and is incremented by 1 for each combo. Breaking the combo will reset the number of points awarded to 1. Upon touching the water the player is returned to the main menu and the current high score is displayed. Being procedurally generated, The level continues indefinitely until the player dies.

Thematically the level is set in an an arctic-like landscape, with the snow particle effects contributing to the setting. Also contributing are the penguin model, the water shader, the music (made by Alex Rymark Vorm), and the water shader sourced from the Suimono Unity plugin. Overall, these elements work together to produce a play experience which manages to be visually consistent and feature high amounts of replayability, especially given the limited scope of the game.

The game was made together with August Almgren, Sven Santema, Alex Rymark Vorm