EMRE FINDIK
In this puzzle platformer, you must carefully plan your moves around the map. Your clones are out to get you and mirror every move you make. Use knives, electricity, and poisonous chemicals to dispose of this science experiment gone wrong.
Clone Combat is a Flash puzzle platformer game that I created with four other students at Cornell from September to December 2015. The game was a semester-long project for the class Analytics-Driven Game Design. Our Beta release received around 20,000 hits in its first week on various Flash game websites, and it was featured on Newgrounds' homepage for ten days as one of the best releases during November 2015.
I contributed to the game in the roles of programmer, level designer and sound designer. Two other programmers and I wrote the game code in ActionScript using Flixel as our game engine. For my sound design work, I mostly used ProTools and Audacity.
GAMEPLAY
The game is set in a remote cloning lab in the desert. The player controls an anthropomorphic figure using their PC keyboard through a series of short levels. Each level presents a puzzle in which the player must kill all of the figure's clones using any available means. The clones are not intelligent, they simply mirror whatever action the figure makes - if the figure were to take a step to the right, they would step to the left.
The player has four actions in the game:
- move left/right
- jump
- throw knife
- step on electric shock button
As stated, each of these actions affect both the figure and the clones. Except for the left/right movement, all actions require all of the characters to be on a platform - that is, no one should be in the air. If this requirement is met, actions could be realized for some of these characters and not all. For example, two clones may have knives and the figure and the other clones may have not, and when the player presses the key to throw a knife, the two clones will throw their knives while the other characters do nothing. Another example is when the player instructs the figure to move to the right but a wall is in its way. The clones will still move to the left while the figure stands still. A key aspect of solving the puzzles is taking advantage of such asymmetries in character actions.
A character can die in three ways: getting hit by a thrown knife, suffering an electric shock and falling into a pot of corrosive chemicals. A puzzle may allow characters to die in one or more of these ways - it is common to find both a knife and a chemical pot in a level. In addition, the clones will kill the main figure if they come into contact. This is a way to both restrict character movement and to strengthen the "player versus clones" theme.