Good Luck With The Lamps! is a simple (puzzle?) platformer based on a completely nonsensical couple's in-joke between the two of us.
Once upon a time on our way to bed one night, one of us wished the other good luck with [turning] the lamps [off]. Somehow that became a nightly ritual, a wrestling match to find out who would be left behind to have said luck with the lamps, a custom designed coffee mug, and a Google Home trained to respond to it as a command.
So we didn't even really have to think about what we'd call our first joint game dev venture, the only question was what the gameplay should be. I was too busy giggling at the lamps to really care, and he loves retro platformers, so here we are!
Day 1: We set up a fairly standard 2d character controller and movement, found some placeholder assets to test out some level configurations, and set about figuring out how to make a lamp object with a light that could be toggled on/off on collision. At this stage everything was basically a square of one colour or another, and we spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to code around the fundamental problem of putting two colliders on our player object. By the end of the day we could toggle the lamps, track how many were turned on at any one time, and spawn an exit to the next level when all were toggled off.
(Sorry for the obnoxious end screen in this gif, that was all his idea)
Day 2: We made some graphics! Still placeholder, but at least they're ours. We wanted to get the thing playable from start to finish asap so set up some extremely rough menu and game over screens, and figured out how to string multiple levels together. Today's big task was really figuring out how Unity handles scale of graphics, and how to get the pixel look we wanted, but we got there in the end.
Also I learned to do super basic pixel animations, which was fun!
Day 3: We finally moved the two colliders off our Player object and into child objects, and we're kicking ourselves for not doing it sooner. I started making some terrible pixel art for our character to replace the placeholder fox from the asset store.
Introducing Mr. James Bearington, who just wants to turn off his lamps and go to bed. He's only slightly creepy looking.
We're currently experimenting with time limits and basic patrolling enemies, although we'll see what actually makes it into the final product.
Development will slow down a lot now since we're back at work after the weekend, but progress was good! I'm reasonably confident we can put a decent level of polish into this, and most importantly we're having a ton of fun with our stupid little game.
