WARNING: Due to a suspected bug in Unity's Pixel Perfect Camera component the scene is not being cropped. There is a small possibility of a strobe-like effect where the game should be cropped. If you know a workaround for this cropping bug please let me know and I will update the builds immediately.

Welcome to Lock'n'Key!

Lock'n'Key is an entry for My First Game Jam 2021. It is a chill game made for a 3 year old. The aim is very simple and should be clear when you play. 

Controls

WASD, arrow keys, or joystick to move.

My goal

To make a game a 3 year old can play without getting stuck or frustrated.

Design decisions

In no particular order: 

1. No text - my 3 year old can't read
2. No necessary button input
3. "Enemies" are not permanent
4. No player health, lives or progression loss (including level resets)
5. No camera movement (ie single screen, everything visible)
6. Have silly interactions to illicit laughs (slapstick is likely to work)
7. Player traversable areas should be fairly forgiving and wide
8. Interactions between player and objects must happen automatically (feeds back into "no button input" decision)

Feedback

I'm very open to feedback, especially if you have a young child around that you can show this to. Thank you for playing.

Learnings

Boiling gameplay down to purely movement requires more thinking about level design and interesting environmental-based mechanics. Another idea I had was to add obstacles like a river, dust belt etc that push you in a direction. I ran out of time to do this.

Having a single screen with 16 x 16 tiles probably could have benefited from being zoomed out a little further to give more play space possibilities. This is likely to be more important with the introduction of more mechanics and environmental obstacles.

Unity's Universal Render Pipeline is fraught with interesting states of technology. I probably wouldn't try using it again. In this case I used it because I wanted to try 2D lights but that slipped away from me and they weren't implemented.

Unrelated to my game but related to my goal for this game jam, I'm very excited to get my 3yo Mario Kart 8 Deluxe due to the steering and acceleration assist modes. If you're not familiar with it, it's a toggle you can set when choosing your player that will stop you going off the edge of the track and will softly guide you around corners. The other toggle—which can be done in combination of the other—will accelerate for you, so all you have to do is steer. What a wonderful feature and idea from Nintendo.

Notes

1. I can't in good conscience upload a Mac version, the strobe effect happens 100% of the time in testing. This is the same bug caused by the Pixel Perfect Camera crop not working but the effect is so much worse on macOS.

Tools, resources and thanks

• Kenney - Character art that never got replaced!
• Chiptone - An incredible tool for generating SFX (especially with BFXR/SFXR out of action)
• @rama_rollin on Twitter - For reaching out with some timely encouragement when things were tough. Their itch.io page. 
• ExpanseVR - A YouTube channel aimed at beginners that really gels with the way my brain works
• Unity 3D - The engine everybody knows about
• Aseprite - An incredibly fun sprite editor
• Karnivool- An Australian prog rock band. I lost count of how many times the Themata album played through