Procrastination Adventure is a 2D side-scrolling platform game. The player moves left, right, and can jump and shoot. There are various platforms the player can walk on, so the game features various levels of elevation. The player progresses left-to-right through Mudd-themed levels, while looking for fun things to do and avoiding homework at all costs! The game will not allow the player to move the game screen left, so any items/enemies the player fails to deal with can't be gone back for.
Enemy assignment types, in order of toughness, include homework, quizzes, projects, and exams. The easier the assignment type is, the more prevalent instances of it are in the game's levels. The tougher the assignment, the more dangerous it is. Tough assignments are quite boring and require a lot of attention! Accordingly, getting hit by an enemy will cause the player's fun meter to drop. At some point in the game the player can obtain a magic nerd pen which they can repeatedly throw at assignments to destroy them. Destroying an assignment (without it hurting you) is fun and yields fun points.
The only way to destroy assignments is to shoot them with magic nerd pens. However, these pens are in short supply and have to be found by the player. Shooting pens is a fairly basic procedure: pressing a button causes a pen to shoot out in the direction the player is facing. Pens fly in a horizontal line until they hit an assignment or leave the screen.
The goal of Procrastination Adventure is to maximize your number of fun points. Scoring as many fun points as possible is indeed a goal of the game, but the game also features a "Fun Meter" which must be filled past a certain point before the player can exit a level. Gaining fun points increases the fun meter, however you can never lose points if an enemy hits you, only parts of your fun meter. To gain fun points, the player can either find fun item pickups (videogames, magazines, etc), or stay in the game's various "fun zones"
Fun Zones are areas of the game's levels which give the player points simply for standing in them for as long as they can (i.e. in front of a West Dorm fire or in the North Dorm lounge during dorm meeting, depending on level). However, fun zones only contain a finite amount of points, and can be dried up if the player receives all of those points. It should also be noted that assignments have a good chance of catching up to you if you're standing around having too much fun!
To finish a level, the player must reach the far right side of the level and walk through a marked goal. However, the goal can only be entered if the player's fun meter is filled over a certain level. If a player enters a goal without having met their fun quota, they must try the level over. As the game screen does not scroll left, the player has no choice but to enter the goal.
-- AdamKangas - 03 Feb 2004