Mood is an action game where players must match colors to avoid obstacles and pick up items.
Controls: WASD: Move; Space Bar: Select/Use invincibility powerup
I worked with another programmer who made the pausing system and two of the levels. I did the rest of the programming.
Reason
Mood was made for the Low Rez Jam 2020, which required participants to create a 64x64px game in two weeks, from July 31st to August 16th.
Goals
Even though the gameplay was simple, I wanted the production quality of the game to be higher than previous ones I made. This meant making my own animations and scene changes. I also wanted the act of making levels to be simple and all done in the editor, that way my other teammate could make levels of his own without having to look at the code.
Challenges
Scaling the screen and having it an appropriate resolution was a slight problem. Saving the game proved to be a tricky task, as I haven’t dealt with saving too much in my past games, and it wasn’t implemented until later in production. During creation of this game I was also making Invasive, so I had to figure out how to balance production of the two.
Solutions
The problem with save states were figured out once I understood the locations the binary files were being saved. The Unity editor would save what I previously playtested, so I was getting errors because there was already a save file present. The other programmer working on the game was able to figure out the screen scaling, which was just simply putting the correct reference scale in the pixel perfect camera component.
Reflection
Overall I thought the production was successful within the given time and while also working on another game. I was able to implement a save menu so the player could come back and try the levels again. By making a level creator within the Unity Editor, which was basically listing all the events that should happen at a certain time, the creation of the levels were quick and easy. I also made it simple to change the color palettes of the levels and have the colors affect the various animations. This was done by making all the sprites white, then tinting the desired color through code.
