What is the game about?

“I thought about a game where our normal world is connected with a shadow world”

The main gameplay is switching between the normal and a shadow world:

What went right:

-Concept: My concept was pretty unusual. Using the shadows to solve puzzles isn´t something you see very often in games. The switching and shadow mechanics made the player think in completely new ways.

-Theme: I think I had this idea longer in mind but never really bothered making it. But when I saw LD30´s theme I immediately reminded myself of this idea.

-Graphics: Especially the style of the shadow world was very minimalistic and easy to make. Many liked the aesthetic and compared it to games like Antichamber or Unfinished Swan.

-Controls: Very simple: LMB for the shadow world; RMB for the real world

-Time management: While it was not possible for me to include everything I imagined I remained pretty relaxed throughout the dev time.

What went wrong:

-Graphics: While I really liked the style of the shadow world I am not amazed by the real world´s design. Originally I wanted the real world to be set in a museum but had not enough time to do this.

-Tutorial: Some pointed out that they liked how I “forced” the player to learn the mechanics by themselves but some users where overwhelmed by the instant switching to the shadow world.

-Character: After some code the next thing I wanted to make was a cool third person avatar. Unfortunately I lost a lot of time by trying to make the model.

-Too easy: In most cases it was possible to cheat your way through the puzzles. (In the postcompo version this is improved. So try it out if you want a challenge)

-Coding: At the beginning I hoped to create a script which would gather all shadow data and dynamically map it on the shadow world achieving better results. Unfortunately the character and a lot of other things alredy stole my time so I decided to go the easy way and created pretty simple shadow planes.

-Time: I overslept …