Kid Kozmik
[Note: This game is available in Pay What You Want format, including free. If you enjoy this game, please support the developer who made it by paying them what you think is fair!]
For centuries Taoists have been telling us all how a harmonious dynamic between universal forces is fundamentally important, but the full extent of this hasn't always been appreciated. In Kid Kozmik, the new platform puzzle game created by Ian Sundstrom in under ten days for the 2015 Procedural Generation Game Jam, the stability of all space and time absolutely depends upon maintaining proper color balance. It's up to you to warp through various sub-realms collecting color crystals to restore the color alignment of the universe! This of course is just the sort of thing career counselors typically describe as 'a worthwhile and meaningful career choice'. Push platforms, flip switches, toggle blocks, and find the color crystal in each sub-realm and make it back through the warp pipes back to the main realm, but don't take too long! Each realm is rapidly destabilizing for want of a proper color balance, and as the hourglass at the lower-left of the screen ticks down the world's colors begin to distort, the music starts to go wonky, your environment fills up with particle effect shapes and when your time's up you'll have to start that world over again!
For all its brief design period Kid Kozmik is full of interesting visual choices which confer it with a unique visual appearance, from particles to shifting colors to its choice of 3/4ths perspective in a game that relies on jumping from platforms onto other platforms that are both hovering unsupported in empty space for no apparent reason. All without disappearing into the void, because you certainly won't be hovering around unsupported! Occasionally three dimensions will also make an appearance, such as when you'll need to stand on something you couldn't get to otherwise. For all that, the game is quite happy to accept [arrow keys] or a directional pad to move, and [space], [A] or [X] to hop. It doesn't keep score or even keep tabs on how many lives you've gone through either: You'll start each new life at the beginning of the realm you were in, with simply a different color palette. Which is the most interesting thing about Kid Kozmik, if you don't count the imaginative gameplay or the fact that you're a bear-person tasked with saving the entirety of existence singlehandedly. In keeping with the Procedural Generation theme, this game uses an auto-generation algorythm to select color-coordinated palettes using basic color theory to provide a selection of colors, tints and shades that looks like it could have been hand picked by an artist. It doesn't always succeed; occasionally the results seem instead like they were picked by van Gogh's colorblind dog. But the result is unique and fascinating either way, and it's still refreshing to find computers at least making the effort to do art. With full marks for originality in both concept and design, Kid Kozmik is one you'll want to check out to get a sense of the effect if nothing else, and we can hope it continues development as a game in its own right with or without the design competition which inspired it.
Windows:
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Mac OS X:
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Linux:
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Three levels? I understand that this was made in ten days, but wow. So glad I just tried it in the browser instead of paying anything for it. Really feels like a demo rather than an actual game.
Update