Theme : Limited Space

The main idea of this theme would be to make a game with small levels. While it can be interesting, I tried to go a bit deeper and chose to make a game that runs with limited memory space. The game would fail to load the textures (which can be the heaviest part of a game), resulting in a game with white squares instead of sprites. The player would have to pick up RAM boost around the levels to load each sprite individually and reveal the textures.

Textures

Even tho the textures are hidden at the start, I still went for a fairly detailled pixel art style (which can be time consumming). It could be a waste of time since the player may not even see the textures. However I figured that if the textures are pretty, it would drive the player to find more RAM and progress in the game to unlock them all.

To achieve the effect of missing textures, I used a custom sprite shader. The shader has 3 states: Unloaded (white, no alpha), Hovered (glowing pink when hovered by the mouse) and Loaded (basic sprite shader), which each object of the scene can update during runtime. For some reasons, even tho the Unloaded textures have no alpha, there is still clipping happening somewhere so the sprites are not perfect squares. It wasn't planned but it's even better because it shows the animations while being very abstract.

Gameplay

Most of the game is a basic top down shooter. Initially I wanted to make enemies difficult to fight when their textures are missing, so the player would have to choose which one to reveal with their limited RAM (which I couldn't achieve in time). To have the texture mechanic be more relevant to the gameplay, I added a few puzzles in some levels. Puzzles are made easier the more you reveal relevant textures, but they are somewhat doable with missing textures.

Results

The game ranked 7th out of 489 compo submissions (2166 in total). It also ranked under 50th in all categories. It's a very strongh result overall, especially for a puzzle game with a secret endind, that most people would miss. Surprisingly, it didn't perform that well in the "Theme" categorie, even though I thought it was a really nice take on the Limited Space theme.