Playthrough + Description


I've uploaded a video playthrough for Spectrum. Below is taken from the video's description:

I knew exactly what basic premise I wanted to create and quickly got it up and running within a couple of days, using the rest of the time to try to polish it up a bit more.

I wanted the game to be minimalist, so reduced the amount of text and instructions as much as possible, I wanted people to develop their own meaning from the game as they play.
I wanted to create what would appear on the surface to just be a simple, short platformer game (and hopefully be fun to play). Throughout the game, I expect some people to question coins that they spot which appear out of reach. Then reveal more of the world to the player than they could originally see when it was black & white. The way that the game runs is that if you restrict the view of the world to just two colours (black and white, no argument about whether they're colours please), you restrict how much of the world you can experience. Opening up your view to see the full (visible) spectrum shows there is more than you could originally see.
It was an interesting jam for me to take part in, I tried to dabble a bit more with shaders. It's a shader which restricts the view, literally the whole time you play it's all there and rendered, then I use a shader to alter the image so only some of the world is visible.
Unfortunately I didn't have so much time dedicated to designing the level themselves, and as such they ramped up in difficulty very quickly. The fourth section in particular is brutal, as is evidenced by me struggling with it twice. I adjusted it just before the jam ended to try to simplify it but it's still difficult. I imagine most people will not make it to the end, especially in a jam like this. They will probably try it for a bit and decide just it was a simple platformer and probably wonder what it's relevance to the theme was! Instead of altering the levels further, I decided to record this play-through so that hopefully people can still get the full picture of what I was trying to create. I finished this playthrough with a racing heart and sweaty palms, so much pressure to actually pass the game! I thankfully managed it first time with the exception that I missed the final coin! Which as a completionist kills me. However, I worry it was beginners luck and that I would just get worse if I kept trying! I think there's plenty of gameplay in this video to get a sense of how it works.

Get Spectrum

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.