I Dare You to Start This Game is a 2D UI puzzler developed in the Godot Engine. It was made in under two weeks for Acerola Jam 0. The goal of the game is to "start the game," but upon clicking on the start button, it is revealed that the menu is actually a Lights Out puzzle where the goal is to get the entire menu full of start buttons in order for the game to "start."
The main twist is that the puzzle isn't static. One of the buttons the player will cycle through is a slice button, which forces the player to draw a straight line through the entire menu, bisecting any buttons it crosses. Unlike all other buttons, the slice button will not be cycled out by clicking any buttons beside it, forcing the player to slice through the screen each time they encounter it in order to cycle past it.
Other buttons also have different effects upon being clicked, some working in the player's favor. Additionally, each button will apply an effect when that button type fills the screen.
During the past year, I had been considering ideas for unconventional (and mostly bad) UI/UX design a la Microsoft Bob. When the theme of the game jam was revealed to be "aberration," I dusted off this Lights Out menu idea and got to work.
Besides audio and fonts, the entirety of the game was made by me using the Godot Engine. My work included:
- Programming: A web-playable build in Godot 4 using GDScript rather than C#. Godot 4 with C# cannot export web builds.
- Programming and UI/UX Design: UI buttons in Godot from scratch using polygons. The buttons in the game were not limited to being rectangular, so the regular Godot Control nodes couldn't be used in this case.
- Shaders: Using Godot's shader language to procedurally create button textures at runtime that worked with a button of any shape.
- Programming: A resource-based system that utilized a modified version of the Strategy pattern that made it easy to introduce new button types to the game at any point.
You can find the project's Github repository here: https://github.com/m-khadadeh/AberrationGame.