About the Game

What is Ripholes in Rubbish all about? Below is an overview of the game and its core mechanics.

• Overview of the Game
• Gameplay
• Gallery
• Frequently Asked Questions

Overview

The following trailer represents some of the gameplay and core mechanics players experience in game. The video was created by Max Lampert.

The world of Ripholes in Rubbish takes place in a sketch book. The player plays as a sketched avatar in an magical animated land. Her goal is to find her lost friend, Arky.

Ripholes’ core mechanic is the player’s ability to rip and paste level elements and other game characters (doods, short for doodles). Although the player can move and jump freely, they will not be able to complete all the levels without using their ripping ability.

The game is broken down into different levels, or sketchbooks. These levels are further broken down into pages.

The ripping ability’s first noticeable effect is that it freezes time, allowing the player to rip and paste anywhere within the main screen and within the same page as the avatar. The player has a limit of three ripped objects she can hold in her inventory at any time, and objects can only be pasted once they’ve been ripped into the player’s inventory. Ripping creates a hole that the player can pass through, such as on the page below or a page above if the player is standing underneath it. Ripping in white space will create only a hole, and the blank paper is discarded by the avatar.

The ripping mechanic will also react differently depending on the media used to draw (or paint) objects into the game world. For example, acrylic paint is unrippable and can’t be pasted over because it is such a heavier and thicker medium than the others found in the game. The majority of play experience will be the player running and jumping around the levels, ripping obstacles off the page and pasting them to create new routes to their goals in the level.

Game Play

In Ripholes, players traverse levels mainly by moving side to side and jumping. Objects found in levels will sometimes augment the player’s movement, such as a spring that launches the player or a rope drawn in that allows the player to swing from it.

The player will often have to use their ripping and pasting abilities to remove obstacles from their path and paste those obstacles to take advantage of them to reach their goals for the level. This includes objects and entities that become animated after pasting, and a few that are animated before the player rips them off the page.

When a player enters a new level, they will be at a fixed start position and all elements of the level will begin at fixed locations as well. Every level will have a "collectible item" for the player to retrieve that will reveal a secret in the game when all pieces are collected. These items will serve as a side goal for the player to achieve and add replayability to the levels.

Players will proceed through sets of levels of varying numbers of pages each. New sketchbooks present different challenges and new items to collect.

Gallery

Frequenty asked Questions

To view a FAQ, click on the link and a box will pop below. To close the FAQ, simply click on the same link again

• What programming environment did you use?

  Ripholes was programmed in C/C++ in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional on top of the PALib library. All of the art was hand drawn in Photoshop.

• How did you come up with the initial concept of the game?

  The three people who pitched the game idea in CS170 were Max, Kevin and Mee. We were brainstorming ideas and things that inspired us. One of the members mentioned the flash short Animator vs Animation. From that the idea of playing in a sketched world came up and various mechanics, such as drawing new items on the levels, came up and evolved over time. Initially the game was going to take into account gravity and have drawn objects fall because we didn't want to make levels easy if the player can create infinite stair cases.

• Did you have a Nintendo DS developement kit?

  No. Nintendo explicitly told us the following:
  
  "Unfortunately our corporate policies prohibit authorization of educational institutions, research facilities, or other non-profit organizations for development on Nintendo platforms."
  
  Therefore we are forced to homebrew Ripholes for the Nintendo DS which was extremely difficult because we didn't have an efficient way to debug our game during the developement process.

• Why did you choose to built the game for the Nintendo DS?

  We've had our ups and downs with the NDS console (especially because we didn't have a devKit), so why did we stick with it? We wanted the players to feel like they were actually "ripping" objects from pages, so taking advantage of the stylus was ideal. We also wanted to target a broad group of gamers, specifically the younger groups and older groups. The NDS is a friendly hand-held platform and we wanted to target casual gamers who like to play on the go or if they simply want to enjoy something fun to play. We also wanted to take advantage of the dual screens, separating the HUD from the game play screen.

• How did you choose the art direction?

  We wanted the game to feel like something similar to what a normal person in real life would draw in her sketchbook. We chose a whimsical child-like style because we felt it fit the target audience the most and wanted to make the feel of the game happy-go-lucky. The music also matches this child-like theme. We wanted to keep the world innocent and exciting.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact us.