Jurassic Jump is a dinosaur-themed platformer that started as a JavaScript exercise where I was hand-rolling gravity and collision physics, and ended up as a Godot project once it became clear I was spending more time on the engine than on the game.
Moving to Godot
Writing your own physics loop is a useful exercise up to the point where you actually want to make a game. Switching to Godot meant I could stop worrying about the plumbing — scene composition, collision shapes, sprite animation, level iteration — and start tuning the things that affect how the game feels.
The hard part was never the mechanic. It was getting the standard pieces to feel acceptable: jump height, acceleration, collision boundaries, camera framing, level spacing. These things matter more than they look like they should.
The claymation constraint
The visual direction was claymation-style sprites with layered parallax backgrounds. That wasn’t just aesthetic — once the art had that much visual weight, the movement model had to be slower and more readable than a twitch platformer. The art and mechanics had to agree with each other, which made both more constrained and more intentional.
Where it stands
Jurassic Jump is a small learning game, not a commercial platformer. It made platformer physics concrete, moved a prototype into a real engine, and produced a browser-playable export. If I rebuilt it I’d define the movement model and level progression before producing too many visual assets.