How to train your Bacon

As I was testing new, just out of the oven of Tiled, Crisp Bacon level, one pretty basic and, honestly, quite boring looking part of the map made me stop, think and count. So I stopped, thought about it and counted the different ways my piggly character can use actions, environment and power ups to get through that part. And since my main intention always was to put as much freedom in the linearity of 2D runner, the results made me quite happy about the existing (and not yet final!) set of mechanics.

Let’s do gifs, shall we?

Pig, you’re basic.

Crisp Bacon Double Jump Gif Crisp Bacon jump climb over

A pretty standard approach to a obstacle problem. As a pig, you either jump over it or you climb over it. Former method in this case required a serious jump-hold timings to achieve, but latter is the thing, which makes you lose leaderboard positions to your friends.

Unleashing inner powers

Crisp Power Up Below Crisp Bacon farts

This is where the things starts getting fun! Providing piglet has a “beer” or “pepper” in his “pockets”, you can use it to gently fart above or below an obstacle. The choice is for a player to make. I would personally go under, just to show off my flatulent skills for those annoying bees, which will surely start to chase our pink hero soon…

Oh, no – bees!

If you have already played Crisp Bacon, you already know how annoying they can be. Well, the question is.. to butt-stomp or not to butt-stomp. I’d say stomp.  Always stomp. It’s so much more fun than being chased after!

Double Bee Stomp Crisp Bacon Climb Down Bee Stomp

Ah, the simple joys of having a fart-hardened bottom! In the images above we can see a piglet not being very environmentally friendly (for his own good). A GIF in the right displays a use of an available action, which is guaranteed to force an uninstall from some new players, who are taping “jump” button mindlessly while climbing above the pits. While it is not clear in this particular part of level, jumping down might be useful in a situation where there are power up or an acorn on the wall and it’s either faster to regain speed while moving down or something you don’t particularly like awaits above.

Spider Pig, Spider Pig…

Spider Pig Spider Pig Bee and spider pig

It was pretty complicated to implement “spider pig” move, since Crisp Bacon got this power only in the last iteration and my code was already complicated enough, but it was one of the obvious joke ideas I had a long time ago and added a lot to the hilarity of the game as well as freedom to the gameplay. Once again, piggy on the left chooses bee-friendly route and piggy decides to eliminate at least one of the enemies, since he has plenty of bee-related issues already. Good timing on that “chili”, piggy on the right. Saved your pink bottom.

End of the lesson

There are even more ways to overcome this small part of the map by combining already described techniques, but I don’t want to spoil everything. I really hope this post displays at least a little bit distinction from Crisp Bacon and a “generic runner” or “Mario clone”.  It might not be most original game in the world, but cut me a little bit of slack.

And I would like to finish this post with a hilarious bug I found out while recording gameplay. Easily reproducible by “diving” and using “chili” mid air.

Crisp Bacon chili bug
I can’t even describe it.

Crisp Bacon For Android

5 thoughts on “How to train your Bacon”

  1. Pingback: Hello from Lithuanian Android developer! - Android Forums

  2. Pingback: Crisp Bacon - pig-based "porkour" runner (free)

  3. Pingback: Making GIFs of your game | SnoutUP

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