Tesseract

For HEJ March I used the themes The Level is Your HP and Puzzle-Shooter (leaving out Adapt and Spring).

I was always fascinated by the 4th and the higher spatial dimensions. Not that I would be fully capable of understanding every aspect of the theories and math behind it, but I would be able to talk about the matter with someone. Now you may think “Ok, so this guy made a 4 dimensional game right? Well, no. 🙂 I made a 2D puzzle game with the Commodore 64 palette, and the hypercube, or tesseract is just a macguffin object. I also put this world within one of my existing game’s world I often do (and others do it too). Like I have the Wizard of Tut’s Wizard character in the same universe as Ian Stokesworth, the protagonist of Tesseract is a similar character like the one in my 2nd HEJ game I’ve ever made: LUSH. As the story goes, the people of Dimension 0 are higher beings and whenever there is a dimensional trouble strikes the lesser dimensions and their inhabitants, they send Environ-Mentalists to try to save them.

As per usual for my C64 looking games, I put the C64 starting prompt and screen at the start of the game. Hitting any keyboard keys, the LOAD”*”,8,1 appears character by character, and after a short loading screen the game starts.

Well, life has me between the anvil and the hammer for a while now, so making this game wasn’t really a priority. I came up with the idea that the player has to move tiles around with a beam, and has to move them into the tesseract to save them. Every saved tile will give 200 points, but every clicks the player makes substract 10 points, and every step the player takes substract 1 point at the end of the level. This is to emphasize that this game needs careful consideration before acting, and there is time, as any enemies only move when the player clicks (and enemies only appear after level 5). Voidemons are going for the closest tile, and should any of them linger on a tile, they bite in them (basically eating the number on it one by one). They can be stunned with the foldebeam, directly hitting them, or just by catching them in the beam. There is the Voideca a stationary enemy, but pushing or pulling a tile on it will destroy that tile immediately, no matter what number is on it. There is an immovable tile, that can be walked on, but voidemons cannot cross. The 13 levels I made are usually about to navigate tiles around these, so voidemons cannot eat them. I thought about new type of tiles, enemies and stuff to do, but I got tired with this project (and other stuff), so I just left it as it is. In the comments someone posted a review / playthrough and though it was in (probably) Russian, I saw there are some potentionally major problems. I saw one time a tile moved in an irregular angle and even in 45 degree and that should not happen at all (I let the character push / pull only when its position can be divided by 16 without any fraction leftovers). I also saw once a voidemon just standing down, not pursuing tiles, not even eating when I pushed a tile under it, not stunned, just standing in one place. I tried to look into these and even tried to improve some other stuff, but I got in a sort of loop, where it seemed a problem only can be solved if I start to check things at least twice and that would have meant I need to rewrite the whole section so I just left it with minor checks that maybe solved the problem. Sometimes I run into problems like this and for a jam game I am not always willing to do rewrites. I also fiddled with the tesseract for a while that you can see on the main screen. First I had the great idea on how I can make it: I found a gif on the internet, I tracked the hypercube’s points on all frames, and it showed that every point goes around on an elliptical path. I added paths into the screen, I added points, positioned them on the path to the correct position, I even managed to guessed the correct speed they have to go around. But when I connected the correct points, and it started to animate, first it was good, then it distorted, then went back to the correct form. So, all the points’ speed should be modified as they go around. No thanks. Finally I selected 24 frames, overdraw them wit C64 colors. It took me a couple of hours, but the result looked good at least.

For the music I used music I bought some time ago, composed by Andrew Sitkov. I remembered that I used music from this composer before and again it was cool and fitting. The game has a few sound effects, that was generated with Chiptone and then repurposed / cut to fit the game. For the backgrounds I just looked up some space pictures and backgrounds and even some gifs, repurposed them with Aseprite to fit the c64 aesthetic. I even made a background for this. Even though the base was an AI generated reference, I photobashed together a background to fit the game.

All in all, I learned some things, mostly about my current limitations when it comes to coding. I like how the project turned out even if I just leave it as it is. I hope people still likes the idea of the game. 🙂

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