Windows Download (8.20MB)
Release Date: July 24th, 2023
Note: A Keyboard with a Num Pad is required to play this game. You will also need to enable Num Lock on your keyboard. Press the correct keys on your Num Pad and collect as many Smiley Boys™ as you can as time trickles away in this fast-paced score-attack game. Avoid touching those stinky Angy Boys™ though, or your remaining time and total score will suffer!   
There's honestly not much of a huge story behind
num_lock's development. It's really just a game that
came together in a couple days and was once again
inspired by my love of typing. The game's first build was July 20th and the final build was July 22nd, two days before it
released, just to give you an idea of how quickly it
came together.
From start to finish this game basically looked exactly as it does in its final form. Pulling the ASDF aesthetic into a new project is very easy, so I didn't have to waste much time on getting the game ready other than coding the main menu. I opted to not have background art for this one just because I thought it was fine as-is, and I didn't want to shrink Sayara's art down to the very tiny window this game plays in (480x360, my lowest resolution game, actually). The only thing that took some figuring out was randomizing the Boys in the 3x3 grid and then refreshing the board once all five Smiley Boys in a board had been collected. I recycled some room completion code from SynchroniZ to achieve the latter. I think the thing I like about this game the most is that despite the fact that it's such a simple premise, the game has a good feel to it. Everything is snappy, the little flash of selecting a square feels good, and most importantly the sound effects are PERFECT. The game has a sensation of popping bubble wrap, and I think we all agree that's one of the most satisfying things ever. Speaking of satisfying, it was really fun watching people run for scores on this one when it came out! What I hadn't expected was that there would be people who could be insanely good at it. Even so good to almost triple all high scores set during testing. My friend Baliis in particular had a technique I had not anticipated... Big Gamedev Mistake Warning: Never underestimate rhythm game players' ability to recognize patterns and press buttons really fast! num_lock was created in the midst of a really bad time. SynchroniZ and ASDF 2, two games I'd really put a lot of effort and myself into, both had troubled launches, and I was smack-dab in the middle of the worst year of my life emotionally. I needed something that felt like a win, and I'm not ashamed to say that this game getting the elevated levels of attention it got did make me feel like maybe I still had it, even though it'd be quite a while before I made another action-focused game. |