Low Power: Battery Charge
Vira Games · Puzzle · 2023
One hero, a dead phone, and a different way to control it on every single level.
Context
The phone is out of battery and every level is about getting it to a socket. What changes each time is the game itself: the rules of control are rewritten level after level.
Half a dozen levels, half a dozen different games
Prototyping
Each level runs on its own mechanic rather than a harder version of the last one.
Draw a trajectory by dragging and time the run through a moving obstacle. Do it again with vertical obstacles and a flip. Swipe through a maze. Tap to hop the phone forward without landing flat, the way a bottle flip works. Hit the green window of a sweeping timing bar. Clear a path across a desk by swiping objects away in the right order. Slide cushions under a phone that is already bouncing.
The interesting part of this project was not any one of those. It was building that many distinct control schemes, each with its own feel, inside one small game — and doing it by composition. Every level runs the same phone prefab with a different set of components bolted on, so a mechanic like trajectory drawing is a part, not a rewrite.
Worth calling out
I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.
- The levels
- A separate control scheme, feel and failure state for every level in the game.
- The shared frame that holds them together: the phone, the socket, and the run of attempts.
More from the game
Project facts
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Unity Developer
- Team
- Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me
- Scope
- Solo developer, concept to release
- Studio
- Vira Games
- Released as
- Medoc Games
- Engine
- Unity, C#
- Platform
- Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore
- Target device
- Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM
- Mechanics
- Nine different control schemes — trajectory drawing, swipe mazes, bottle-flip hops, timing bars, cable steering
- Architecture
- One phone prefab, a different set of components per level — mechanics composed, never rewritten
- Levels
- Many, with the nine mechanics cycling through them
- Where to see it
- Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Low Power: Battery Charge