Saturday, November 28, 2020

LowRezJam 2020: "Blur"

"Blur" was my solo entry to the LowRezJam 2020, a game jam where you have to make a game with a maximum resolution of 64x64 pixels. I decided to make a sound-driven story game where you play an astronaut trying to safety navigate their spacecraft back to Earth after an explosion on the spacecraft. The general idea of the game is that you regain consciousness after the accident and are experiencing temporary loss of vision: the game begins with a resolution of 1x1 pixel. As you start to regain your sense and get you spacecraft back in order, your vision slowly starts to return as the game progresses from 2x2 pixels to 4x4 pixels to 8x8 pixels and eventually 64x64 pixels by the end of the game. With the help of ground control over the radio you need to problem solve your way through malfunctioning subsystems, power restarts, communication failures, fire in the cabin and eventually safely re-enter your spacecraft back down to the ground.



I had a lot of fun making this game: because it was so dependant on sound, it relied pretty heavily on some voice acting, a script and various sound effects, so it was a good learning experience trying to do a lot of this stuff for the first time in a game. It made me realise too that making sound-driven games is really hard to get right and find good puzzles and mechanics.




The game was programmed in Python/Pygame and there are both Windows and Mac OSX builds of the game (made via PyInstaller) that are available, as well as the game source code, here:

"Blur" by mit-mit on itch.io (https://mit-mit-mit-mit.itch.io/blur)