1game2views3bitcolors4you
Made for the GoedWare Game Jam Limited Color Palette Edition which limited the color palette to 8 specific colors and had the theme "Two Points of View". Unless I made a mistake somewhere this should really be only those given 8 colors without any notable shading, fading, gradients, transparency or fake colors via dithering.
I wanted to make something unique instead of just copying an existing game: After thinking about splitscreen and switching between different dimensions/times which seemed like a lot of work and not that unique I decided on having two different camera perspectives which I think hasn't been done before in this combination. There are games that use different side angles and some that switch between a third person and first person view but my fixed side view and top down might be more unique.
I used the color palette with black, white and six colors in two physical color puzzles and color coded the game a bit. Like red always indicates movable objects. Green and cyan is normal static world geometry. Blue is water and sky of course.
At first I had a side view and first person view but first person threw up a lot of questions about how that changes the control and if the camera is suddenly freely movable and also what kind of gameplay elements there would be. I wanted an orange grapple hook with orange surfaces to pull yourself to but decided against all that and went with a top down view instead which is fine with a fixed camera and the two axis control I already had for swimming.
This is my second Unity game and second game jam I participated in. In my first I learned about basic Unity things and particles. This time I focused on physical character control and animations even including proper character rotation when swimming. Also instead of using textures I mostly used realtime shader code to display patterns based on world and object position which adds to the abstract look given by the limited color palette. All world geometry, the water and the sky are all based on 3D or 4D noise.
I eventually got custom lighting to work with only using the given palette colors, so without any gradients. The rules are apparently not that strict but I wanted to to try it anyway to make a general toon / cel shader.
The game could be way longer by stretching everything out like more water, more platforming, more puzzles, ... but that all seemed like unnecessary things we all have already seen in hundreds of previous games so I kept it short and easy to focus on getting more things implemented and polished.
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Interesting concept but it's hard to concentrate on gameplay with this character movements. Reduce slipping(maybe delay).
What delay?
It's supposed to be a bit challenging and I wanted to have it be somewhat dynamic and physical. Maybe it's a bit much, maybe it's an odd mix between typical platformers and these more physical ball steering games.
I already reduced the difficulty of the puzzles, before the dices were quite hard to flip and the spheres were rolling around way too much. That also made it fun though. I feel it's hard to balance difficulty. I wanted it to be somewhat tricky to be a fun challenge but still relatively easy instead of some trivial "grab box and drop on button" stuff. It should be a "Ah I managed to beat this slightly challenging / non trivial puzzle! Yay!".
Well. I just tried playing through it again. I'm really trying my best. After the perspective shift tutorial, there's a narrow pathway. I fell from it about 15 times. The character's movement feels unintuitive - they continue running even after I release the key. Every time I die later in the game, I have to return to this walkway again. I'm not trying to diminish your work. I'm just sharing my honest feedback.