Release

Hi,

I decided to participate in LOWREZJAM 2023 together with a friend to try out something entirely different this time.

The game jam restricted us to work with a resolution of 64x64 or lower. This had some significant impacts on the development of the game. Our initial idea was to make a classic tower defense game. But because of the small resolution, we came up with something different. We made a game where one places luminous orbs to delay a mysterious void that devours everything.

Gameplay

We had ideas for all different kinds of orbs. The issue was: How can we communicate this to the player? With the low resolution, we couldn’t easily add descriptions. Also, we would need some resource system to “buy” orbs, and balancing the game would be more difficult.

In the end, we decided to have only one type of orb you can place. Further, you can have only 15 orbs at the same time. This makes the game much easier to get into. You just have to click to place an orb. While this makes the game very simple, there is still some strategic depth. You need to find good spots for your orbs in order to survive longer.

The game turned out to be a high-score game where you try to survive as long as possible. It is already quite a challenge to resist the void for more than 3 minutes. You can also try to place as many orbs as possible. What’s even more fun is to place the orbs in a way such that the surrounding void looks like a certain object at some point during the game. Try it out yourself and get the void to look like a cat!

(It has no name. But it doesn’t matter since it will die soon anyway…)

For further variety, we added several difficulties. Here, we just varied initial positions for core orbs and void tiles. There are even difficulties where you have several cores to protect. To give the difficulties some unique touch, we varied the gradient that is used as background. The design space for this game turned out to be much larger than I thought. Even while writing this, I got an idea that I needed to try out and add to the game…

Visuals

Although I enjoy doing pixel art (see my other project), I decided to not do any for this game. When we still had no theme, I tried to create some candles but this didn’t work well with the low resolution. Therefore, we decided to use much simpler objects as light sources. In fact, light effects and gradients were enough for the visuals of the entire game and I’m quite satisfied with the result.

I am especially proud with how the orbs turned out. This might now be a bit technical. For orbs, I simply used a white square and added a point light. By changing the energy of the light, I could give the orbs this pulsating effect. While this looked great, it wasn’t exciting enough for me. So I tried something out. I added a constant rotation to the orbs. If this game had a high resolution, there wouldn’t be any difference at all. But with how snapping to pixels in Godot works, the orbs received this cool mechanical animation I got basically for free. It is so satisfying to look at the orbs now.

Sound

Another design part was the sound of the game. To enhance the feeling of the approaching void, I added a constant background noise that intensifies over time. I gave the orbs some pulsating sound effect and added a sound for placing orbs. But the most important sound effect is this glass breaking effect that can be heard when an orb breaks. This gives the game such a stressful moment and works very well with the theme. Especially, when several orbs break in a short time frame.

I really like how all the sound effects work together and I love the tension you get in this game. You can feel the void. Well, at least I can feel it sometimes. Check out the credits to see where I got the sound effects from.

Conclusion

I’m very proud of how the game turned out and I loved working on it.

LOWREZJAM was definitely a great motivation to try something new and we learned a lot about Godot, especially lights, gradients and tilemaps. I’m looking forward to my next game jam.

Thanks for reading and don’t get lost in the void!