Inverse Pair
Controls
| Movement | WASD / Arrow Keys / ZQSD / IJKL + Spacebar |
| Restart | R |
| Close | Escape - WINDOWS ONLY |
| Fullscreen | F11 - WINDOWS ONLY |
About
This is single-player negative space puzzle-platformer made in 2 hours, 56 minutes for Trijam 61; Theme: Negative Space!
This game ended up winning first place in Trijam 61!
I had been doing Trijam weekly for a solid while, but I fell off recently and have missed the last 5 Trijams due to family, work, etc. Trijam has been using my Game Jam Theme Generator since I created it for Trijam 53, generating a handful of themes which the community then votes on. This time, Negative Space cropped up, and I felt like I had to finally get back on the Trijam horse for it! I've been obsessed with negative space in game design for over a decade, specifically for this idea of inverse collisions environments, where two characters or systems exist in each other's negative space. I've made several games in that family, this being the newest addition! These always end up being my favorite games to make... I need to do more!
This game was also my first game of 7 in my solo jam non-GDC 2020 Week of Games! where I'm making a new small game every day that I'm stuck in San Francisco due to GDC 2020's cancellation.
It was also submitted to Duality Jam as it fit within the time-frame and its theme/description of being "a week-long challenge to create a game emphasizing some concept of duality, like opposing elements, black vs. white, up vs. down, etc.." seemed to fit Inverse Pair to a tee! The final theme of MIRROR WORLDS is exactly what this game is about!
It was also submitted to Decade Jam and Neverending Jams, because everything should be! I'm most excited in submitting it to Decade Jam, as this is still a concept I love and hope to continue to nurture and grow over the next decade. Maybe within a decade I can make my old dream game, Negativity, in its true form!
All assets of this game were made in the 3 hours by me, except the music which was still made by me but at an earlier time outside the 3 hours.
Dev Vlog
Download
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Comments
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It's a smart cool game :)
Thank you!
This game was nice and chill. I appreciate that I could play at my own pace while relaxing music plays.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it,
Great game! I love how challanging and creative the levels are!
Thank you! I really appreciate it! 😊
Played and finished! ) Se you really like your negative-space games ;)
A solid concept! Seen similar ones before, and most the the levels also shared a lot of classic elements with moving "around" the screen to connect to the right side.
I can see that the idea most likely was that BOTH characters where suppose to enter each of there doors, so I will judge it on that (otherwise the mirror world is rather pointless), taking that in account the levels are relatively challenging as you go along.
What I did miss was just something more to flare out the otherwise rather simple levels. Its hard to create that in 3-hours, and honestly just the amount of levels is impressive for that time (+ the transition, love it!), but just something that adds to that mind-bending-feeling I want from these types of games. I think the grey blocks was a great start, but only the loop-around-level really used it to any effect. I would have loved a feature/mechanic that's similar to the glitch transition effect.
A fun play :) Make more and take it to the next level!
Watch Jam Game Showcase 2020-03-22 ~ Duality Jam from MrJoshuaMcLean on www.twitch.tv
Thank you, Josh! ^-^
Yes, it's a lot of text on the game page... I write a lot and don't expect anyone to read it all haha!
Very surprised you downloaded it instead of playing in-browser!
The double jump was indeed a bug; miraculously I never found it before! Neither me or anyone else I've watched play the game found it haha! Easy bug to fix, just surprising.
And the controls were all optional / redundant: WASD or Arrow Keys for the majority, ZQSD for French people with AZERTY keyboards, IJKL for weird people, and spacebar optionally being used as the jump instead of W / Up Arrow, etc. if wanted. It wasn't supposed to be so confusing haha... 😅 Sorry about that! I like to use a lot of redundant control schemes for maximum accessibility (that's kind of a thing for me; I have a talk on game accessibility), so the controls don't need to be in the game as they can just be figured out by whoever plays it, their preference for movement controls being correct as the first thing they try.
And yes, your analysis of the design was spot-on; in the current levels you can just focus on one-at-a-time making the game very easy. This was intentional again to make the game very accessible for a wide array of skill levels. Certain people I playtest with REALLY struggle with these kind of negative space games I love to make, and with the idea of screenwrap. You've obviously played a LOT of games so you've seen it all and can breeze through it understanding everything already, but for more inexperienced players this kind of design is really important. If/when this game is given more levels, it would gradually transition into harder concepts like that, where you need to keep them aligned or hit their goals at the same time, or otherwise juggle more aspects. This is unfortunately a very short, simple prototype made in 3 hours as you saw.
Thanks again for playing! Stay safe and have a great day!
Hey Gunnar, glad I was able to help you find a bug! I definitely appreciate the accessibility concerns, especially when it comes to difficulty - always better to err on the side of "too easy" but broadly playable. It's definitely an impressive amount of content for three hours. If you happen to go back and extend it I'd love to have another go. :)
very fun - had a blast :)
Is the WebGL build working? I can't see any player, and arrow keys appear to have no effect... it just creates a level, then tears it down and creates another one... and sometimes it just stops
Yeah, it works for me and all my other players... I'm not sure what's happening for you? Try reloading the page, and click inside the view for the iframe to recognize your input; if all else fails just download the local Windows build.
Hmm... I've reloaded the page, and I've clicked on it. None of the keys appear to do anything except R, which causes it to tear down and reload. And I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like, but all I see is a pattern of white blocks on a gray background. So strange!
(Unfortunately the local Windows build won't run on my Mac.)
EDIT: But don't worry about it — what I can see of the game looks really awesome. Clearly this is some sort of bug in the engine, and not your fault.
OK, that was in Firefox... tried again with Safari, and it works! Really neat game. I love how some squares are foreground for one character and background for the other. The puzzle level was just the right difficulty, too. Great job!
Gotcha! Duh, I should have asked that first... I've heard of Firefox not liking to run web games correctly but I totally forgot about that aspect. Thank you for letting me know!
And thanks! Yeah, this concept of negative space collision environments where two characters / systems exist in each other's negative space is something I've been obsessed with for some ten years. For white, white is the foreground and black is the background, and for black, black is the foreground and white is the background. I've made several games in this vein:https://itch.io/c/713576/negative-space-games
What PC are you running? Are you on any kind of VPN or something?
You're the only person that's seemed to have any issue with running the game and I'm very interested in knowing why :/
This game made my brain hurt! It started off easy, but then my head started spinning when the little guys got split up. This was fun to play! Great job.
Thanks, Rich 😊
I love your "Doppelgate" game, and this game is like this! I liked the transition between levels. Really cool effect. Only one problem, players is not animated, but it's not a matter (because this game is created by 3 hours). I am stuck on a level with gray blocks.
I just now saw in these gray blocks the words "you win"...
Yeah haha sorry that wasn't the most clear 😅 though I kinda like hearing about people realizing it when they see the text haha...
Thanks! Yeah this and Doppelgate are some of my favorite games; I'm still so obsessed with this negative space concept.