Itchy!

In Itchy! you are a bug that walks on the skin of a giant monster and makes it itchy. The bug tries to eat the food while fleeing from the scratching hand of the monster.

Game map is automatically generated as a Voronoi diagram. In some games, Voronoi diagrams are used to generate natural looking texture and terrain. The diagram visually resembles a reptile skin, but it also forms a complex cellular structure that can be used as a movement constraint. In chess or hex, where square or hexagonal tiling is used, every cell looks alike. But, in a Voronoi diagram, every cell has a different shape and varying number of neighbors. I used the Voronoi cells as the valid positions for the bug.

On the map, the bug is allowed to walk from one cell to one of its neighbors at a time. From top-down view, player left-clicks on the map to make the bug walk to a neighboring cell. Some cells contain food the bug should eat and finish. The bug creates itchyness on the cells it walks on.

Presence of the monster is felt by hearing its groanings of irritation from itching. After every moaning comes the monster's hand to scratch. The main tension is either to continue eating or to flee the expected scratch. The bug is either eating food or running around.

Itchy does not include a level progression, but has a freeform mode where the player can adjust the difficulty by changing (1) the frequency and speed of monster's scratching (2) the itchyness of the skin, and (3) the total amount of food available on the map. (More info)

Uğur Güney is a physicist and I'm a computer scientist. We had made this game for the first Global Game Jam 2009 in Ankara, Turkey.

Itch.io seems to be the proper platform to distribute Itchy!

And its price is set to $1.01 for version 1.01.