Contrast
Contrast is a monochrome metroidvania involving light, shadows, and getting lost in the dark built in Godot.
The Idea
I was once doodling in my journal and I made a cute little character that I liked. I was like, “hey I should put that into a video game!”. So I started to draw different iterations of it digitally, but one block I kept running into was that I wasn’t sure how to add color to it, because I always doodle in black and white. After thinking about that for quite a bit, I decided, “you know what? I don’t even need color, I’ll just make a completely monochrome game!” (not a real quote, but basically my train of thought). I eventually landed on a version that I drew in GIMP and animated using Skeleton2D in Godot. So at this point I had a character and… nothing else, but that was enough to build off of.
The Development
I knew I would be making the game in Godot from the start, because my computer would die if I tried running Unreal Engine, and I don’t know how to use Unity. After making the character I basically made the rest of the game as I went, adding bits of terrain, playing with shaders, and all of that fun stuff.
What I learned
Making this game felt very spiritual for me. I even started to have dreams set in the world of the game. And I learned SO MUCH. I feel like I was having to google something every other minute, but that’s okay because of the sheer amount of information I took in.
Overall
This was such an amazing journey and process, especially documenting my progress in Stardance. Whoever is reading this, thank you for rating my project!!!
- 4 devlogs
- 24h
- 12.26x multiplier
- 291 Stardust
The time just keeps on ticking… A lot has changed since the last devlog so bear with me.
. There is now a pause menu when you press escape that can quit to the main menu. I successfully made the “unstable zone”, so there is a bar at the top of the hud that moves back and forth depending on whether the player is inverted or not. The idea is that you have to balance between light and dark. If the bar gets to one end, you get damaged every one second. 
. I also added a portal to go between levels and a whole second level with gpu particle rain!! 
I also improved the GameManager’s level switching so it’s much more adaptive now. There is also now an end, as this is just a demo.
, for now it only goes down when you fall off the edge of something. You reset to the last safe place you were standing.
I also added a ripple shader that has no purpose at the moment but it will don’t worry 
so we’ll see how much is done when I ship
), and a shader that inverts colors. The shader will probably be involved in a gameplay thingy later, but for now, it’s just to look nice. Making the shader was really hard, actually 
even though it was really simple…
. HOWEVER I did also learn some valuable lessons, and made a GameManager, so I don’t think it was a complete waste
)
I am back with another project, having shipped the vent alien. This is a monochrome metroidvania involving light, shadows, and getting lost in the dark 
. (Clearly still need to figure out some lore)
. I also added a button to trigger it so you don’t have to reset the board or plug it in every time you need to dazzle someone.
