In the waning of '23 I made my first notable attempt to develop a videogame. It evolved from a novel concept about dodging sniper crosshairs using momentum to a poorly visualized shoot-em-up. This has not seen the light of day, but in the midst of attempting to salvage the project I realized that making it became a lame endeavor when I consigned myself to the existing shoot-em-up paradigm. From this, the only step forward was to make a game hewn from an idea entirely disparate from the existing medium. Thus I set out to make something based off of the skiing robot found in the Wallace and Gromit films
LowVoltage was made in a month, most of which was dedicated to the ever frustrating ordeal of ensuring variable resolutions are available and functional. LowVoltage uses 3 rendering and scaling steps to ensure correct typeface appearance. When I felt the project was nearing its 'Use By' date in the pantry of my mind, I saw mothers' day as a good deadline. Scrapped from the original scope as consequence was a second screen, from which you would repair the engine in a more convoluted sequence. This was scrapped but the second screen is still accessible if you walk off the main asteroid from the right direction. As a reward for discovering this, you can crash the program.
It is in no way a difficult game if you know what you're doing. Perhaps adding a little manual PDF explaining some of the more obtuse rules in the download would eliminate most of the challenge, but what would remain? The iterations of understanding a work what makes up the much sought after sensation of exploration, is the abscence of intuitive design. The confusion wrought by how the cloning pod functioned made most of those I convinced to playtest for me exhibit the only interest in the game and not the project as a whole.