Mountain Rush
Mountain Rush is an exciting casual game where you roll and jump through a randomly generated level, avoiding new and unique obstacles, and collecting crystals to unlock new marbles!
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Mountain Rush can be played now in your browser! This version is not supported, and any minor bugs will not be fixed. Please still let me know (minibonzogames@gmail.com) and known bugs will be posted here.
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Development Story
Mountain Rush was my sixth mobile game, and my first sequel, as it is the direct successor of Rolling Rush, my first mobile game. There were so many new ideas and improvements I could think of after releasing Rolling Rush that I knew I had to give it another go, and there came Mountain Rush. There are different levels, different difficulties and different balls this time, and it is certainly the game I had most fun making up until this point. I really enjoyed redeveloping all the obstacles and adding new ones, and I especially enjoyed the 3D Design elements, most notably the new ball designs. I swapped the solid colour sphere for an Icosphere, a spherical shape made of triangles, so I could change the colour of each triangle to create different patterns that the player could unlock. I also added Cookie Balls, which had chocolate chips (also icospheres) embedded in them, and the currency of the game, Crystals, were also physical 3D objects that the player could collide with to obtain. A major improvement that isn't as tangible as that the playing experience as a whole is much smoother, and the graphics don't glitch and lag as much as they do in Rolling Rush, both probably symptoms of the fact that I actually knew how to code while making it, so the code is more efficient and less bodgy. I started making Mountain Rush in early 2022 after finishing Fruit Sort and Merge Coin, but took a break to start and later abandon Fall Defence, an early version of what later became Leaf Buster, before finishing Mountain Rush in August and releasing in November.
Gameplay and Controls
Very similar to it's prequel, Rolling Rush, the player controls a ball as it rolls towards a series of randomly generating platforms and obstacles. The player can use a joystick to steer left and right, and can tap the screen above the joystick to jump. There are 5 different levels, each with different platform arrangements, and many dfferent types of obstacles, some move, rotate, roll or bounce, and some are too tall to bounce over or too wide to steer around. As the ball automatically rolls forward, the player's score increases. Every 50 points the player's ball will roll under an arch, giving it a speed boost for the rest of the run. The player may also encounter purple crystals, which they can roll into to collect and spend on unlocking different coloured and patterned balls. Unlike Rolling Rush, the game is always in Endless Mode, there is no mode with any set end point, so scores can go all the way to the integer limit. There are also no checkpoints, players have to start from 0 points in every run.
Difficulties
There are 3 different difficulties in the game, all available in each of the 5 levels, Normal, Hard and Impossible. The starting rolling speed of the ball increases as the difficulties get harder. The player also has a different highscore for each of the 3 difficulties, shown separately in the Change Level menu.
Levels
There are 5 different levels in the game, each with a different arrangement of platforms. The first level is Climb, where the player has to keep jumping to avoid hitting the edges of platforms as they incrementally increase in height each time. There are fewer full width obstacles here, as every new platform is effectively a full width obstacle. The second level is Descend, which is the exact same as Climb but in reverse. The player needs to be careful, their ball must be on the ground in order to jump, so as the ball falls off each platform, steering is key to make sure you don't fall into an obstacle on the next platform. The third level is Valley, where the platform is in a V shape with a small flat section in the middle. Moving up the sides of the platform is slower than moving down so steering can be more awkward. The premium fourth and fifth levels, Slope and Landslide, use the same mechanic but the gradient is only in one direction, introducing rolling obstacles that spawn at the tops and roll down.
Balls
There are 20 different coloured, patterned balls that the player can unlock by spending Crystals or purchasing IAPs (in the case of the Cookie Balls). The 20 balls are Turquoise, Light Blue, Blue, Purple, Pink, Light Green, Orange, Red, Ocean, Splash, Wavy, Grass, Peach, Bright, Spark, Fire, Cookie, White Cookie, Dark Cookie and Rainbow Cookie. The different balls don't change the gameplay at all, and despite the fact that the texture isn't exactly a sphere (as there are no curved edges, it is made entirely of flat triangles) the hitbox is a perfect sphere, so it still rolls smoothly in game. Designing the different balls was one of my favourite parts of developing this game. In my previous games my graphics have either been solid colour spheres and cuboids or 2D, so experimenting with details and patterns on more complex 3D objects was really fun.
