Electro Exile

Overview

You play a battery that drains as it moves, and different terrain drains it faster, so a simple platformer quietly becomes a resource puzzle where every jump and route choice costs energy. Electro Exile (released as The Last Battery) came out of my first-ever game jam, a four-person team, third place at the BEST IT Festival. I owned player movement and the core architecture.

Technical Highlights

• Movement that feels right. I built the player controller with variable jump height, coyote time and head-bump handling, tuned so a tap gives a snappy hop while holding jump extends the arc. The whole thing runs on physics velocity rather than a jump state machine.
• Timestamp-based coyote time. The forgiveness window is driven by a grounded timestamp checked on jump input rather than formal states, with careful ordering between the wall checks and the jump logic to keep the timing reliable.

Learnings

As my first jam, it was a crash course in rapid prototyping and working as a team under a hard deadline. The movement and architecture work here became a foundation I carried into later Placeholders Studio projects.