Elevation 2023

For this GameJam, I attempted to re-create a game I made 20 years ago back in college.

This re-creation has been fairly difficult and the result is not great yet, but many of the assets have been pixel by pixel recreated. In order to re-create the bouncing effect of boxes, I ended up removing the built in gravity from Unity framework and implemented a very simple gravity system, but it is a bit broken still.

About the original Elevation game:
The game I made in college was developed using the Pop Framework which came with the textbook for the class. The game's core mechanics are double jumps and corner grabs. The double jumps are executed by bouncing off of a red block and then jumping in mid-air. The corner grabs are executed by pushing towards a block while against the corner of a block. Both of these features were not part of the original concept of the game so they were bugs and I couldn't find a way to fix them. Instead, I incorporated the bugs into the level design. There is an obvious ugliness in the original that I hope is clear was intentional. This was inspired by the technique that I used to make the two fake blocks. The background appears to have very large pixels while the red platform blocks have a thin border. So I scaled the background 4x so that the actual pixel size could be the same width as the red block borders. That allowed me to draw the fake red blocks into the background while still making them stand out from the rest of the background scene. I have noticed that the border of the fake blocks doesn't look as nice on modern computers as it did back in 2003. Oh well.
The gameplay video attached is video of me playing the original game for comparison to the uploaded project here.