In Shadow

In Shadow is a little puzzle game that I made in college (2018) as a way to show off the functional capabilities of an SDL engine I designed. While a bit rough around the edges, the game concept was something I’d been kicking around for years, and at the time in early 2018 it was kind of novel. While I spent more time on the engine itself, it’s nice to look back and see a complete application of the work I did, rather than a bunch of stuffy design documents.

In the game you play as two characters, Persei and the Luminar, switching off control between the two to solve puzzles. The Luminar casts shadows upon the objects in each puzzle room that Persei interacts with, and the two characters must be positioned and manipulated in a number of ways to get Persei to the exit of each room.

When I originally planned the game, I was banking on a custom physics engine I was engineering so that the shadow bounding boxes could be updated in real time as the shadows moved, which could knock Persei around in the process. As my deadline for the semester loomed, I eventually scrapped that once I jumped ship over to Box2D so I wouldn’t fail. A number of shadow-based games have come out since I made this, but none have quite scratched the itch I have for a physics-based game with dynamic meshing…it’s something I’d like to revisit in the future.

The game is currently Windows only, unfortunately, but you can grab it at itch.io if you can play it. You can also check out the Github repo here.