I have played this game before.
I liked the gameplay. But I think I have played a similar game long time ago, just can't remember the name or plataform...
@zeroone did you take the idea from what games? You said this is an original one but I'm almost sure I played a game where the player code traverse the screen like Dord.
I borrowed ideas from many platformers. The wraparound world is really an old video game convention. It's present in Bubble Bobble, Super Bomberman 2 (and others in the series), Mario Brothers (the original arcade game), Super Mario Brothers 2 (see Fryguy's Boss Battle for instance), Super Mario Brothers 3 (World 7-1 for instance), Pac-Man (tunnels), Asteriods, and many others. I wanted to create something portal-like that would not eat up a lot of bytes.
The spikes and appearing block sequences were inspired by Mega Man 2 (Heat Man's stage for instance). In an early version, the player collected strawberries (Ms. Pac-Man inspired), but they morphed into strawberry-shaped diamonds after trying to come up with something more appealing to acquire. The reverse gravity was inspired by Strider. The enemy sprites are based on Space Invaders. Originally, I had different enemy sprites. But, I actually like the look better with all the same sprite, just different color variations. The large eyes on the player and the enemies were inspired by anime and it's appearance in games like the Mega Man series. The rotating orange enemy chains were inspired by the fire rods in the castles of Super Mario Brothers. The rotating yellow enemies were inspired by the Zingers (the bees) in Donkey Kong Country.
The look of the player is actually a mix of 3 different things. IBM released a Lode Runner ripoff called Freddy's Rescue Roundup in 1984 and I (as a little kid) used to play it on the IBM PCjr. I borrowed the idea of a head with 2 feet from that game. I already mentioned the anime eyes. The third element also came from the IBM PCjr. The PCjr was a PC with cartridge slots that IBM attempted to market as a game machine. You could hook it up to either a PC monitor or a television set. When used with a TV set, you had to switch it to a large font mode to compensate for the lack of resolution. They provided a 40x25 text mode. To give you a sense of how large those characters were, they are each roughly equal to 32x32 pixel tiles on a typical resolution today. Somehow I taught myself Cartridge BASIC on that machine and I quickly discovered that (extended) ASCII characters 1 and 2 were happy faces. I created a little platformer using character 1, even using the asterisks character as spikes.
And one more thing, I wanted a one word title that had no meaning. Look up the word dord.
