Sloth Swing

Game Premise

In Sloth Swing, you shoot a sloth out of a cannon and swing around with a grappling gun. You need to get past saws, lasers, and sharks to reach a jumbo bed for the sloth to nap in. 

It's designed to be a ridiculous physics platforming challenge that requires player skill to win.

Game Development Process

The Team

Sloth Swing was developed over five business days by Jon Gardner and Jeremy McCurdy. 

Jon was the game designer and lead programmer. He started the lab off with a desire to build a game around using a grappling hook to navigate a game environment. 

Jeremy was the game artist and a support programmer. He was responsible for determining the visual style of the game and for creating game assets. 

Ideation

The sloth character and game premise was decided for a few reasons:

• A sloth is a relatively simple bipedal character to model and rig. 
• Going with a traditionally slow creature in a fast and silly physics game adds some  great comedic value.
• It gave us a narrative reason to complete levels, the sloth wants to take a nap, so the end goal is a comfy bed!

Changes During Development

Over the course of the week, we changed the game design a couple of times. 

The first major change was the introduction of the cannon to start levels off. This gives an element of timing, and it's a really fun way to get things started.

The second major change was in level structure. Originally, we were going to create longer flowing levels similar to a game like Super Mario Bros. Since players can easily die and a lot of finesse is required to navigate, we opted for shorter "challenge" style levels; more in line with a game like Super Meat Boy.