Headbutt Dino

A game about smashing

There are already plenty of running games about dodging obstacles, so I wanted to make the opposite. Every obstacle here gets headbutted out of the way.

The higher your combo climbs, the more densely the next obstacles are packed. Keep it going and the screen eventually fills up — that moment, when you send countless obstacles flying at once, is the moment I built this game for.

Cards

Smashing obstacles fills a gauge, and a full gauge becomes a gacha ticket. You spend tickets between stages to get cards. Your deck holds eight cards, and one of them is fixed per character — that one can't be dropped. You can hold five in hand.

Cards are split into five suits: Ball Play, Fire Play, Friends, Bullseye, and Snowball Fight. Collecting the same suit turns on that suit's synergy, and holding cards from different suits makes the two meet and turn on something else. Whether it's more fun to commit to one suit or to mix them, I honestly still don't know myself.

Active cards cost a little combo to use.

Bosses

There's a boss at the end of every stage. All the destruction score you've built up until then becomes the force of the headbutt that breaks it. What's left is a number — and it gets compared against your own best for that same stage, every time.

The boss interferes while you run. It swings the camera to the side, or flips the screen over. Obstacles flashing magenta are the boss's — take one head-on and your destruction score drops.

A run

A run is ten stages. The first and last are always the glacier; everything in between is drawn differently each run. That said, you spend a long stretch inside the boss's space, so you may not get a good look at them.

When you move on to the next stage, five cards stand on the road, one per lane. Which lane you enter is which card you buy, so I never built a separate shop screen.

When a run ends, the scores you smashed out in each stage are added up and saved to your records.