Gradatim

A platformer/rhythmic game. The moments available for jumps and dashes are dictated by rhythms of the music, adding a few puzzles to it.

The final project of the course “Fundamentals of Programming”. A hybrid-genre game inspired by Patapon and Celeste. I was quite absorbed, spending all the time on it without sparing efforts for other courses. I even had a serious idea of a story about a catastrophe-stricken tribe which lost all their arts and a passionate apprentice who went off travelling the world learning from maestri.

The course project is not a game jam — one and a half months is enough for one to become associated with a messy pile of code, images, sounds, and configuration files.

Only a video was put up, since the content of the game was not rich enough and the difficulty curve was odd. It was not a polished project anyway.

The title was inspired by the Latin phrase gradus ad Parnassum (steps to Parnassus). In ancient Greek mythology, one of the two peaks of the Parnassus Mountains was home to Apollo, the god of the sun, and the Muses, the goddesses of arts; while the other to Dionysus, the god of wines. The phrase has therefore been used multiple times as titles of textbooks in arts, symbolising the stepping stones to higher levels. The game’s title gradatim means “step by step, gradually” in Latin.