Created by: Polly
Music by: PANICPUMPKIN
Testing and Feedback: Rhete and Ghosty

Without getting too personal, I actually tend to do some of my best work when I'm either in a bad mood, depressed, or angry. This game happened at a time when I was juggling all three like I was center stage at the damn circus.

This one only took about three evenings to come together. The idea of marrying num_lock's simple "just press the buttons" premise to the more focused and precise nature of ASDF2's had been knocking around in my head for a while. Since I wasn't really feeling like diving back into my much bigger project that, as of the time of this writing (July 18th, 2025) is about 50-60% complete, I decided to pull this one out of the idea pile and start hammering away.

I wanted this one to be playable with keyboard or gamepad, because I wanted to see the difference in how others approached it as well as how my own skills would differ between the two. (I like both fairly equally!) The only really big change to the game was that it was going to be 2 minutes long just like num_lock, but I added another minute of playtime on the final version because I liked how you can sorta start feeling yourself struggle a bit in that last minute as the time ticks down.

There aren't really any cool "in-development" assets or versions of this game or anything to show off here. The game had a relatively painless dev cycle and, as mentioned, was finished rather quickly. That said there are some bits of presentation I put in that were fun.

Firstly is the use of GameMaker 2's built-in effects. I already started using them in the aforementioned big project, but I decided to bring them over here since both games share the "Boys™" Aesthetic.

I'm a fan of the light glow that the playfield and certain elements have. Just makes it feel a bit more neon and future-cool in a way that looks good to my eyes. There's also a warpy animated distortion effect happening on the background and the floaty shapes.

Originally, I wanted to just yoink some EarthBound battle backgrounds, but there wasn't an easy way to go about that, so I improvised by taking an old generic desktop image I've had on my external hard drive for years, doing a bit of editing, and throwing the Ripple effect on in the room editor. I got something close to the "wavy gravy" look I was going for.

Lastly the music is of course by PANICPUMPKIN, who's had a really good record of having tunes that fit these games perfectly. I fear I may have mined the depths of their material for tunes that work for my games, but we'll cross that bridge later.

The only other note on audio is that the "OOF!" sound that plays when you mistakenly knock out one of your earned +1s is me! I did about 20 "OOF" takes and just used the first one layered with that silly stock punch sound effect you've literally heard everywhere.

So anyway, what the hell's this game even called? It's just a symbol! It could be Plus, Cross, or some combination of the two. While making the game I couldn't settle on anything I liked, so I just chose to go with "➕" and not elaborate further. I do have a title that I think of it as now, but we'll just let the game stand on its own as my very first single character game name! Isn't that fun?

Lastly, a couple things about the logo. It wasn't until the game was finished that I realized the original version of the logo was actually offset on the left side, so that side of the symbol was one pixel longer. This required me to tear out the logo I'd animated and used all over the game and re-implement it in both versions. Only took about an hour, but it was definitely embarrassing.

I've actually left a holdover of this in the game, as well because I'm lazy! The main menu cursor is a spinning ➕, but the left side is offset by one, so the spinning is ever so slightly off if you look close enough.

Anyway, this was a cute little project that I have a lot of fun playing and I think turned out well!

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