Bitshift is a 2-D sidescrolling platformer focused around the mechanic of changing the resolution of the game world. You play as a troubled Tufts Computer Science student trying to finish your Game Development project on time. You must exploit the resolution bug in your game in order to get to the end and fix the bug before your Game Development project is due.
Controls:
Left/Right Arrow Keys — Move left or right; in the main menu and in cutscenes, move forward in dialog.
Up Arrow Key — Jump; hold down for longer jumps
Down Arrow — Fast fall; press while in the air to immediately fall downwards
Spacebar — Bitshift; change between low and high resolution worlds
P - Pause/Unpause
NOTE: There are secret debug keys
Interactables:
Boulders — Round rocks that can be rolled up or down hills and which block turret fire. In high-res, that is. In the low-res world, boulders are not affected by gravity, have square corners, and function as stable platforms.
Turrets — Enemies that fire dangerous one-hit-kill projectiles at the player. In high-res, the turrets fire bullets that move extremely quickly. The bullets are small, however, and have a visible bar showing the time until the next bullet is fired. In low-res, the bullets are much larger, and fire more rapidly. However they fire at a lower frequency, making low-res turrets a sort of bullet-hell obstacle.
Slopes — Slopes are hills in the game levels that, in the high-res world, can be used as slides.
Clouds — Clouds in the high-res world act like regular clouds: puffy little water friends that sit around doing nothing and not interacting with the world. They can be walked or jumped through. In low-res, clouds form solid platforms the player slowly drips through, though they cannot be passed through from below, leading to timing puzzles where in order to access an area the player must bitshift to pass through the cloud and then turn to the low-resolution world to stand on the cloud.
Spikes — Spikes are deadly in high-res, but act as useful platforms in low-res.
Checkpoints — Shaped like the outline of the player in high-res and an amorphous blob in low-res, checkpoints are the places from which a dead player will respawn.
Levels:
Level 1 — Grass
Level 2 — Ice
Mods:
Bitshift supports modding via loading custom assets. Custom assets should be placed into either assets/art or assets/music in their own directory with an accompanying JSON file containing metadata. A custom set of assets can be loaded by slecting "or not" on the game's main menu and then typing in the name of the desired assets set. Interested users should see the "purpleHair" example for information on how to create a custom sprite sheet. (also try loading the "purpleHair" art set from the game's main menu).
Compatibility:
Bitshift was written in JavaScript using the Phaser game engine [1]. It depends externally on Google Web Fonts, though this is not a game-making functionality. The game should run in most modern browsers and had been tested in the most recent versions of Chrome / Firefox / Opera, as of the due date (10/20/2015).