Light Is Safe

Light is Safe is a top-down 2D puzzle game created for the Brackeys game jam 2022.1 in one week. Your goal is to navigate your way in the dark and find the exit key, by performing a sequence of tasks and solving puzzles, to advance to the next level. The lights will keep going out and furinure will turn into monsters when the lights are off. You have to use the light switches to turn the lights on to keep your fear meter low, and see where you're going.

Background and Development

The theme for this game jam was "It Is Not Real". So, the idea was inspired by kids fearing darkness and imagining seeing things which are NOT REAL!

Some of the tasks and puzzles design aspects are inspired by the PS1 game "Pink Panther: Pinkadelic Pursuit"

The development team consisted of 4 people: me as the programmer, a game designer, and 2 artists.

My Contributions

- As the only coder in the team, I did all the programming for the game including gameplay mechanics , UI design, monsters AI, etc.

- Project management: managing and assigning tasks to other team members and setting deadlines.

- Importing and integrating the art assets.

- Composing the theme music, and making some of the sound effects.

Tasks & Challenges

Switching Lights

The first challenge I faced in this project was the light switching system. For that I used the 2D Lights package for URP. By using global lights and adjusting their intensity, I was able to imitate switching lights on and off.

To add a sense of urgency to the game, we made it so the lights will go out after a short period of time. To turn the lights back on the player can use one of the switches in the level. Each switch can be used only 3 times (has 3 energy levels as we called them), and Each time you use the same switch the lights get weaker and stays on for a shorter period of time.

To store the data for each energy level of the switches I used scriptableObjects.

LightsManager.cs

LightSwitch.cs

LightSwitchData.cs

Lock box

In level 3, we wanted to change the pace of the game by having a special level. Instead of delivering objects to certain places to eventually get the key, in this level the key is inside a lock box that has a 3-digit password. each digit represents the quantity of a specific object in the level (e.g. the quantity of armchairs). So, the player will have to go around and count the required objects and figure out the password to open the lock box.

To add to the replayability of the game, I built a system to randomize the objects used for the password, their amount and their locations in each run of the game. This keeps the level challenging and fresh every time.