Lua, LOVE2D, Tiled - Aug 2018 to Dec 2018 - Solo Developer
A short Metroidvania-type game I put together on really outdated hardware (shoutout to my Dell Latitude laptop from 2007) in high school; simple platforming physics and basic AI. About 20 minutes of gameplay total!
Short Postmortem: The engine I wrote for this game is pretty bad. It’s all very hacked together in a way that having a really open framework and a dynamic language permits, so I blamed most of my bad design choices on the flexibility of Lua and LOVE2D. It was definitely part of the issue, but I also had minimal experience making game engines. This ended up sending me down a rabbit hole of making game engine experiment after game engine experiement in various languages, and was overall a positive thing for me that might not have happened without this game.
Keeping the art super limited was a big help for this game. I kept each tile (including the player) to 8x8, and there’s only 6 colors in the game total. I think these limitations made it much easier to go from idea to implementation, and probably helped with the longevity of the project. I would not want to do this again without someone to collaborate with.