Belgian Game Spotlight - Baby Dino Adventures
Welcome to our fifth Belgian Game Spotlight! Last month, we had a look at the point-and-click narrative game, The Almost Gone. This month we'll be jumping our way through the cute 2D platformer, Baby Dino Adventures by Sleeping Panda Games. That may sound like it's an entire studio behind the game, but in actuality, it's just one person behind everything (making it all the more impressive)
You play as a lost baby T-Rex looking for his lost parents. Use your skill to hop from platform to platform, solve (light) puzzles and make new allies throughout this upcoming cutesy adventure.
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It's immediately obvious that Baby Dino Adventures aims for gamers of all ages. The game is completely violence-free as you don't even defeat enemies by jumping on them, instead, you befriend them. Even the collectable steaks you pick up from the destroyed boxes can be replaced by broccoli in the settings, making sure that the experience is open to everyone, including vegans.
Before we go further, it's perhaps best to let the trailer show you what the gameplay looks like:
Visually, you'll no doubt have noticed the colourful pixelated style. Animating those sprites takes more work than you'd imagine and everything just looks so cute and well crafted, it's a veritable retro feast for gamers who've grown up in an age before high-budget AAA productions with realist graphics.
After every level, you'll return to the world map from which you can move to the next location and also check how many boxes & eggs you may have missed.
You'll probably end up revisiting each level a couple of times if you're a completionist: there are hidden passages and hard to reach places that hide many of the game's collectables. Each level has a varying number of boxes to jump on and one well-hidden egg. The steaks/broccoli you collect will probably also serve some kind of purpose, but it's not yet clear what that will be.
Don't let the cutesy look and child-friendly set-dressing fool you though: there is some challenge to be found in this platformer: if you fall down a pit, it's back to the start for you with all boxes reset. The same thing will happen if you take too many hits from enemies like the bees or the pea shooting plants. Luckily the level of challenge is something you'll be able to configure to your personal tastes in the final version, an easy mode will instead drop you back to a safe distance from where our baby dino met his unfortunate demise.
If this small taste of the game has given you an appetite for more, make sure to support the developer by purchasing it on Steam!
Buy the Early Access version on Steam
Want to keep up-to-date on any developments by this one-man indie game studio? Here are a few places you can follow him:
We hope you've enjoyed this feature article and if you're a Belgian game developer yourself, don't be afraid to reach out and maybe we'll spotlight your game next month!
