In my bedroom on holiday was a white rug with a grid of red lines which my three-year-old nephew immediately took to be lasers, and made up a game where you had to stand on the lasers. Because he’s currently on a classic Nintendo games kick, the game also featured a boss fight. The boss looks like a laser and fires lasers, and you defeat it by throwing fruit at it until it turns grey and falls off the edge. The fruit comes from a pipe above the carpet. (His current favourite game is The Mario With Birdo (1988) and he may have cribbed some ideas.) The game was called Step On All The Lasers Until You Get The Boss, and the following is a fairly faithful recreation of that game in 2D.
Step On All The Lasers Until You Get The Boss
A game built in an hour for a child
The game is designed to work with a gamepad, but if you’re on keyboard then the left and right arrows, X and C are the main controls. It is also designed to be winnable by a child, even if the particular child prefers to have a grown-up do the actual gaming while he takes a more supervisory ‘taking credit’ role. This is not the final version of the game, as there were a lot of revisions, but it is perhaps the definitive version (and you do not want to play the version with the music he wrote by singing it at me and then telling me I had transcribed it wrong).
A key change that he insisted on was that while in the original the game took place at the bottom of the screen, negative space was added below the play area because the bedroom it’s based on was on the top floor.
An important rule is that when the boss is defeated, everybody cheers (because this is what happens at the end of The Mario With Birdo) and so the ‘throw’ button also makes the character cheer.
The boy’s father and aunt both subsequently invented a game-jam where each team is assigned a toddler to direct the game; our other brother merely decried the “unacceptable escalation” of uncling.
The three-year-old is at worst the second most frustrating project manager I’ve ever worked with.
