Morgen the Stern

1/5

A fast-paced horde survival game playing with rope physics.

Designed for the Mini Jame Gam #23, where it ranked #1 overall, and #1 in audio, fun factor and gameplay out of 38 entries.

The choice of a vampire character was tied to the theme of the jam, which was "Decay". It gave us the idea of a fast-paced game with a vampire character whose blood reserves were constantly draining, forcing him to aggressively seek out human prey to survive. Once this was established, the genre of horde survival was an obvious candidate for the type of experience we wanted.

The name of the eponymous character, "Morgen the Stern", is a pun referring to the weapon used in the game, a morgenstern (actually a sort of meteor hammer since it has no handle). This choice of weapon was due to the bonus constraint of the game jam, which was to use a rope as an important in-game object (here the rope is attached to the head of the weapon). It was a great opportunity to add fun rope-physics-based gameplay to the game! So we designed a combat system in which the damage inflicted by the player is dependent on the velocity of the weapon when it strikes its target, creating a very engaging and dynamic fighting experience for the player.

Design highlights

Rope Physics

The core mechanic of Morgen the Stern is its physics-based damage system. The goal with this was to make the gameplay as simple and straightforward as possible, while making it also as juicy and enjoyable as can be.

With this in mind and the "rope" constraint of the game jam, I had the idea to use a meteor hammer as the portagonist's weapon, a weapon that would allow us to make exactly the type of gameplay we needed.

Having a physics-controlled weapon attached to a rope such as this would mean the player could get very creative in their attacks, which was already fun in itself. However, mastering the game feel required carefully tuning all its parameters. The weight of the head should be light enough to accelerate easily, but heavy enough to feel "real" and impactful to the player. The length of the rope should be long and flexible enough to allow a wide range of motion, but not too long or else it would become harder to control and potentially unbalanced.

The weapon is a separate entity from the character, composed of a head with mass and six sections of rope attached together and to the character with simple hinge-like joints. I spent the first hours of the jam simply experimenting with different weights and rope lenghts until I found the configuration that felt just right.

To control the weapon, the player simply has to aim somewhere on the screen and click. The head of the weapon is then propelled in the direction of the mouse pointer with a fixed strength, though it is easy to make it go faster by clicking multiple times or taking advantage of the centrifugal force.

To complement this physics-based approach, I decided that the enemies would be defeated by swinging the weapon fast enough rather than using a classic hitpoints and damage system. Each type of enemy has its own defense value, which represent the amount of "kinetic energy" needed to kill it. When the head of the meteor hammer collides with an enemy, a check occurs to see if its current velocity is greater than the enemy's defense. If so, the enemy dies, if not, it is simply pushed in the direction of the collision without suffering any damage. This means that to defeat the most resistant enemies, the knights, the player needs to really push the physics of the rope (for instance by swinging the weapon in circles to gain momentum) to gather enough velocity!