Spritz the Happy Onion is a video game in development by me! It is a momentum-based platformer in which you play as a little onion with a knife in his head named Spritz. Why does he have a knife in his head? He’s just unlucky, I guess. A monster from deep space has come to eat the moon, so it’s up to Spritz to gather the ingredients for a cake that will spoil it’s appetite. 

Please wishlist the game on Steam! Wishlisting on Steam helps me a tonne!

I wanted my next game after Legumi to be a platformer for a couple reasons. Mainly, I like platformers. I grew up on them. Jumping onto, over and around things is just such an instinctual thing to pick up and any ingredient you throw in with it changes everything so dramatically. They are instant excitement. 

Secondly, Legumi takes a minute to fall in love with, and offers an awkward first date. I’ve demoed it live now at two GDXs and a few other opportunities, and while the few people who do get sucked in get sucked in hard and buy it on the spot, the vast majority decide it’s not for them and move on. Some of that might be my inexperience as a game designer, but some of that is also that Legumi is a lot to wrap your head around at once, and also kindof hard. So for my next project, I wanted to make… you know how Gordon Ramsay judges the skill level of new chefs by how well they make scrambled eggs? I wanted to make scrambled eggs. 

Thirdly, I have a beef with the current crop of indie platformers. They all play basically the same, and they all feel like they need to *add* something, like there isn’t enough fun in creating a slippery but manoeuvrable little vehicle-person and then just setting them in front of an increasingly complex set of obstacle courses. I say, “Why aren’t there any new games like Super Mario Bros?” and people say, “Teddy, there are 5000 platformers uploaded to Steam every day,” and I say “no, nothing I have to read/explore/shoot through, just a quick, fun skill tester,” and they usually get what I mean but for the sake of this hypothetical argument they would then go “pssh, whatever old man.”

So I started making this game! For the main character I’m using my onion, as he is pretty loveable and fills the square-sized hitbox nicely. 

Demoing it at GDX I’ve learned a couple things: 

• I was right, pretty much anyone who was interested enough to pick it up understood it
• I made it way too hard, though.

I was actually worried I had made it too easy, which is why playtesting is so important, I guess. Legumi got hardly any and has similar complaints. Going forward, I’ll be sure to make levels a more breezy affair, with out-of-the way rewards for risky play at most one genuine necessary challenge per level.

It actually wasn’t as big a hit as I was hoping, but hopefully it starts to look more interesting to people the closer I get to it being finished. You can wishlist now on Steam! Please do, it helps me a lot!