"A classic collection with a twist. Pong, Snake, and Space Invaders remixed and reimagined."

Overview

Retro Remix was a prototype created during the summer of 2020 whilst I prepared for my first year of University, developed in Unity 2020.3.45f1 using C#. I created Retro Remix to familiarise myself with various facets of game development; from using Unity and coding in C#, to the actual creative challenges involved in designing and creating something playable. Instead of simply recreating classic video games as a starting point, I wanted to push further beyond these already established games, and challenged myself to mix and add mechanics to create more original designs.

Pong

I wanted to create something mechanically simple to begin with, which led to me recreating Pong, both as a  two player experience as well as against a simple AI. Upon finishing this I wanted to expand upon this, which led me to think about how I could take inspiration from more modern design sensibilities, which led me to consider the current battle royale trend. This led me to create an up to four-player survival Pong. Instead of looking to score goals to win by a points margin, players now have to defend their own goal to avoid losing lives and being eliminated from the game.

Snake & Pacman

The next games I looked to recreate were going to be Snake, then Pacman. However, with the experience I'd already had with Pong, I decided not to remake these games, but take inspiration from them and create Snake-Man. a "snakelike" which has players navigate different mazes to collect pips in an attempt to get the highest score. There are three difficulties to each maze, which simply up the movement speed of the player, and also includes a two-player mode where players compete, avoiding one-another to come out on top with the highest score.

Space Invaders

Finally I took inspiration from Space Invaders to create Space Defenders. In Space Defenders players circumnavigate the Earth in an attempt to defend it from oncoming invaders. As is in Space Invaders, the failstate for this is either the player dies after a certain amount of hits, or an invader ship reaches Earth. I feel having the enemies come from the four different directions adds to the tried and tested Space Invaders formula; it adds more tension and difficulty as players must be quick to react and kill the oncoming waves and keep on top of any others coming from other directions.

To further differentiate the formula, I began working on a teleportation mechanic - some levels would include not only the Earth to defend, but the moon and beyond. This teleportation mechanic would allow for more extreme levels of difficulty as players would have to defend more than one planet at a time, and also introduce an interesting traversal mechanic, as when teleporting players would land on the next planet at the same relative angle as they were on the last - meaning if players needed to get to the other side of Earth quickly, they would be able to teleport to the Moon, and circumnavigate that in a quicker timeframe, to then teleport back to Earth.