The Alt Ctrl Game Jam is one of my favorite jams each year—despite the fact that I'll probably never get to play any of the games made during it. It's a 10 day game jam all about encouraging developers to get creative with their control methods, and Mr Floppy, a platformer made by Cosmografik and Omar Louhichi, is a great example of the ridiculous and fantastic results it can produce.
In the game, you have to help navigate a tiny floppy disk character through the level by using an actual, physical floppy disk as your controller. As seen in the video above, you pull down the metal cover to let Mr Floppy start moving, and then let go and let it snap back up to hop him into the air.
Even without the floppy-flinging control method, Mr Floppy actually looks like a pretty neat little platformer—the unconventional controller is just the icing on the cake. The developers don't explain exactly how they got it working, but there's just something so satisfyingly crisp about that sliding sound being timed to each jump.
Mr Floppy is still in development, but an early version is already available to download from its itch.io page here. It currently only runs on Mac and the page says you'll need an "old floppy disk, a MakeyMakey card and some old wires" if you're dead set on getting it working the way it's truly meant to be played.
