ACE Metric Postmortem

All in all I think it turned out well. One of the major ideas that never made it to fruition was certain variables affecting other variables. For instance, suppose the current level has a rule that an odd valued variable will increment the next variable in the array after hitting the ACE block; And then it would go down the line and check if the variable is odd, and if so Increment the next variable before moving on. That was going to be my major take on the theme of "Mutation" but unfortunately never came to be.

The main idea for this game stems from a trick in a lot of retro games called Arbitrary Code Execution. IF you haven't seen the any% run for Super Mario Bros. 3, Absolutely check it out! It's only 3 minutes long.

Other things that worked really well: Hot dang, did you see that cool effect when you smack the ACE block? I haven't played with Post-Processing that much before this, and wow did it turn out well. It's a combination of enabling bloom, a vignette, chromatic aberration, and motion blur during the camera swoosh. That, as well as turning the game screen to a dark black and white. (with the exception of the ACE block and the object that triggers it.) The black and white effect was done through a very simple shader where I just took the averages of all colors and fed it through the R, G, and B values.

The character movement can be a bit janky. I threw all reasonable and sound game design out the window when I created this script, as I replicated NES style character movement with subpixels and everything. As it turned out, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. There's a few problems, sure, like walls are possible to clip into, the movement can feel a bit stiff at times, and hugging a wall with a box in your hands causes the box to visibly stutter, but those things aside the movement works, and can also track exactly what pixel the player is standing on. Plus It's a whole new way of moving the player that I haven't tried yet, (and probably won't try again) but it also worked very well for looping from one side of the screen to the other.

As a closing note, the game doesn't follow the theme super well, but once I came up with the idea I knew I had to make it.  I'm quite pleased. This is definitely one of those ideas for a game that I'll need to go back to sometime and see if I can make a full game out of it.