My son Charlie did a little play testing and he wondered about the ability of the enemies to "jump off" the log. I had added a feature to the "being pushed along by the log" routine that randomly (1 in 12) let the enemy stop being pushed (i.e. to "jump off"). Obviously this manifested more in the middle of the screen because the enemies ride longer in that zone. That was my hope. This was meant as a way to cut down on the random killing of the enemies as they moved about (something Charlie and I had talked about at great length). This randomness was also meant as an encouragement of the player to try lure the enemies into the upper and lower regions where they could be more assured of being crushed.
Also, the points of intersections of "the road" and "forest paths" also have checks for tracking, so the enemies can jump off when the log goes by hallways and the enemy is near an end of the obstacle. Again, I wanted to diminish the likelihood of the enemies simply being crushed by chance as they moved around. I wanted the player to have to understand and manipulate the tracking behviour of the enemies to lure them to their doom. But the game with the long obstacle still tended to kill enemies quite frequently without the player's efforts even with these tweaks. So the player would often only be facing one or two, which seemed not to be in the original spirit of the game as described. So I went back and looked at the diagrams and noticed that the "car" (obstacle) wasn't depicted as being as wide as the central "road". So I shortened it by two blocks and I have taken out the randomness of the enemies being able to occasionally "jump off."
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