R to restart.

Try pressing space.

Special math gets special prizes.

This is purely a proof of concept.
If you get to the circle you win. I didn't have time to implement a win screen.
GG

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Post Mortem
This isn't the game I'm the most proud of. In fact it's the game I spend the least time on. (Well that's not true I spent far less time on the fish thing, but we don't talk about that catastrophe). But this is the game that I think has possibly the greatest potential. It's a really simple concept but it's highly scalable which creates space for a lot of interesting interaction down the line. I could see this game becoming a fully fledged puzzle game with many more timelines to control all sorts of stuff from more movement to buttons and enemies and the entire level. Everything on the keyboard is a button with an on/off state. So is everything in a computer for that matter. So anything could be abstracted to a boolean timeline. This prompt really lent itself to inspiring the clever work around I came up with. I didn't think that way for any of the other prompts and although I didn't spend hardly any time working on this out of all the prototypes I made this semester I spent the most time thinking about the prompt. I think that just goes to show most of writing is thinking or in this case most of game design is thinking too. That's not the full picture at all, playtesting is far too important, but even then you have to think hard to make the best changes, so it's a give and take. One thing that really helped me with this game was following the mindset of taking the shortest path. This is prototype 0 after all. No playtesting, no iteration, just a proof of concept, a jumping off point. So I forced myself to get the bare minimum functionality and cut all that was unnecessary. Did I mention I started this game at 21:00 the night before it was due? That added a little extra motivation. The decision to take on this new mindset was partially inspired after watching an arstechnica video on sub nautica. The lead dev talked about how crucial prototyping was to the games success and showed many of the early prototypes where the game was ugly and dysfunctional. I said, great I can do ugly and dysfunctional too! But it was through that first prototype of just the absolute bare minimum that you could still get the main idea, the *feel* of the game. That was all that was needed to send sub nautica rocketing forward. So I just used all primitive objects and threw optimization out the window along with any good code practice. Code is always refactored anyways, so I stayed focused on getting that snapshot of potential locked in. It's not pretty under the hood but thankfully I have a decent eye for color pallets as that seemed to be a success which helped draw an audience of players. I also believe the snapshot I was going for was clear to everyone which is all I could have asked for. As for what I did wrong during project. I'm not sure. Maybe don't wait until the last minute, but honestly I wouldn't have done that if it was avoidable so I'm not going to sweat it. I'm happy with the process and I'm happy with what came out of it. It could have turned out horribly I guess, and I could have realized the game just wasn't there, thrown it away never looking back, which I think is exactly what you want for your very first prototype. I would be excited to continue development of this game in future.