Heart Tracer: A Lifesaving Adventure

In "Heart Tracer," players take control of a diligent point navigating through the intricacies of an ECG readout, embodying the role of a lifesaver. As the guardian of the heart, your mission is to maneuver the tracer with precision and care, dodging menacing red lines that represent cardiac anomalies. Each successful pass through the electrocardiogram's peaks and troughs keeps the patient's heart beating and health intact.

But be forewarned – the human heart is full of surprises. Every 20 seconds, the game introduces spontaneous cardiac conditions – the rapid-fire tachycardia or the sluggish bradycardia. These conditions not only alter the heart's rhythm but also the game's difficulty, accelerating or decelerating the pace of obstacles. Your reflexes and resilience will be put to the test as you strive to adapt to the erratic heartbeat of the game.

Heart Tracer is intended as part of The 20 Games Challenge and is intended to be used as part of my personal portfolio as a game developer and designer. The idea was to give a new and fresh spin to Flappy Bird instead of a simple copy cat, I wanted to make something that had personality and character and would stand out a bit from the crowd due to the uniqueness of the concept.

I think the ECG (Electrocardiogram) idea was really a stand-out and fitted nicely in the concept of a point avoiding lines through a level, which is the basic concept behind the original Flappy Bird and gave it a unique feeling to it.

Hopefully this will be the first of many to come with the 20 games challenge and will allow me to expand my portfolio further.

Main Features and technical details:

• An original spin on the classic Flappy Bird gameplay that adds to the creativity.
• Dynamic difficulty, with the introduction of tachycardia and bradycardia that will affect gameplay on the fly.
• Use of Godot 4.1 engine to develop a game from a concept idea in less than a week.
• All assets are created manually using publicly available tools to do pixel art
• All sound effects are made in jsfxr for a 16 bit feel that I think was very suited to the experience.
• The CRT Effect was made with this free CC0 - VHS and CRT monitor effect.
• Main concept was planned and developed by Ame No Hi Studios as a solo developer for my personal portfolio.