The project
Innerface is a small game made in 2 days with a friend for a school exercice. The goal of the exercice was to make a game that challenged one basic rule of video game controls.
We decided to make a 2D platformer where the UI had a real gameplay impact, such as the buttons being actual platforms that the player will have to use to get to the end, while having to change the options of the game to place the different platforms correctly.
The game's rules are simple : the player has to get a key to unlock the door, then get to the door to finish the level.
Programming
I was in charge of coding the controller. We decided to go for a classic platformer controller : running left and right, and a jump.
The challenge was not meant to be focused on the mastery of the controller, but more on finding the right arrangement of options button to get to the key and to the exit.
Apart from the controller, I had to code simple features like a block that killed the character if they touched it.
Level design
At the time of making Innerface, I had no prior experience as a level designer.
As a first step, it was a great experience, since the game was so simple it was easy to control the difficulty and to introduce one by one the interactions that we had created with the options.
The main interactions were the graphics options and the controls options.
The graphic options had 3 sliders that each controlled one aspect of the rendering of the game : saturation, brightness and resolution. I had to create levels that forced the player to move those sliders to use them as platforms, while reducing a lot their visibility. For example, the deadly blocks are colored with a blue indistinguishable from the grey of the regular platforms when the saturation of the game was too low.
The controls options allowed the player to switch from AZERTY controls to QWERTY ones, which they will be forced to do during a few levels, and can be very desorienting at first, but match the intentions of creating a game where the options were meant to be changed.