Due to my limited skills in the arts, I often don't have the time or ability to make plenty of assets and content for game jams. This is most evident in Anti-Matter, where the only two assets I made for it were literally just a rectangle and circle.  Despite this, I recognize the importance of aesthetics when it comes to making games and because of that, I tend to put a lot of effort into the 'feel' of the game. For my Ludum Dare 46 entry, a lot of comments indicated that they enjoyed the feel of the game so I decided to write up on how I did the effects for Anti-Matter.

Theme

Primarily, the game was also about opposing forces. Even before the idea of matter and anti-matter, I already thought about the yin-yang symbol as inspiration. Aside from its symbolism, it also had a simple black and white palette (again no arts skills). 

Once I decided on making this about matter and anti-matter, I knew it had to look "sciencey".  The themes of opposing forces and "science" would dominate my decision making, even for the feedback which I will discuss later on. The black and white palette already helped with that a lot, but it wasn't enough. 

The shape of the arena, I took inspiration from organic chemistry figures for cyclic compounds like benzene to make it look like it was happening inside a molecule. The particle moving around was inspired from electrons moving around an atom. (DISCLAIMER: My game does not describe in any way how molecules and atoms work).  Aside from that I took inspiration from ferrofluid and oil globules in water to give the nucleus area a bubbling liquid look. 

I used Unity's particle system to achieve this effect. I basically just modified their speed, size and lifetime values until they bunched up like bubbles.

For the background music, I looked for some sci-fi tracks. I chose the one I used in the game because it was a bit calming, going with the minimalist art-style, but also a bit fast, helping emphasize the fast-paced gameplay.

The font, I used has a lot of edges. It feels like the font you might find in some sort of computer or terminal in a lab.

Feedback

Feedback was key to making sure that my players understood how to play the game. The controls were simple enough, but not many games out there gave points for bouncing things of the shield thing (as opposed to say hitting something with the ball). I could have done what I did last time and added a text tutorial, but many players don't like to read so I did not want to do that this time. Instead I doubled down on the feedback. 

The game is all about the bouncing black particle so I gave a pleasant 'ding' sound effect every-time it bounces. To communicate that the score goes up when you bounce the black particle off the platform, I made the sound effect louder when that happens. The sound is barely audible when it just bounces of a wall.

The goal of the game is to keep the black particle away from the nucleus particles. To emphasize this, I used for the most irritating explosion sci-fi sound effect I could find. I also added a bit of screen-shake to signal the player that the "molecule was destabilizing." 

When the black particle does eventually destroy the entire nucleus, I wanted the game to show this massive explosion, but anything too flashy would clash with the minimalist nature of the game. It's from this limitation that I thought of just expanding the black particle until it covers the screen, kind of implying that it engulfs the whole universe. (As an added bonus, the black particle copies expand with the main particle since they are child particles, which I thought looked cool so I kept it in).

Scoring

A bit later into the development process I found out that keeping the nucleus from being completely destroyed was too easy BUT keeping all the particles safe was not. I wanted to encourage the players to play better, to do their best to not even allow glancing blows. To solve this problem, I came up with the solution to penalize letting the  black particle near the nucleus. I found out that I could use the score to discourage glancing blows by giving the penalty of subtracting your score. This way, even if you lasted long, your score would reflect if you didn't play well, even resulting in a negative score if you played really badly.

Filling in the gaps

Given the minimalist nature of the game, it felt pretty empty as I was finishing up. Because of the shape of the arena, there was too much whitespace in and beside it. From this problem, I came up with the idea to have the black dot leave copies of itself around the map again using Unity's particle system. This not only filled in the arena, but also distracted the player a bit, making them focus on the game more. It also helped achieve that 'oil-in-water' effect I wanted. This left only the sides of the arena. For this, I added a copy of the arena and bouncing black particle on either side. The effect is subtle enough not to be distracting. This and the fact that the black particle copies also leave copies of themselves in their own arenas makes the molecule on each side feel occupied and makes it feel like the molecule you're looking at is one of the many in the universe.

And that pretty much covers it. I learned a lot from making this game, and from reading this I hope you guys did too!