Retroload

Not Finished

Retroload is not yet far enough done for me to call it complete just yet. There's still balancing, polish, a few bugs, and the boss fight to finish implementing. However it's at a point where people can give it a play and see how it goes, give some feedback etc. 

What Is Retroload?

Retroload is my attempt at reimagining the old classic flash game Motherload from XGenStudios as a Gameboy style game. As such it is based around the Gameboy aspect ratio, is limited to 4 colours, and implements a limited set of features from the original game based on the more limited control set of a Gameboy.

For the most part this game attempts to remain faithful to the original Motherload game, the buildings are only on the surface, you pick up similar ores/treasures, and when you run out of fuel, that's it, kaboom! However there are a few small quality of life adjustments I chose to make (see notes below).

An additional personal challenge, which is as unnecessary as it is arbitrary, was to create the entire project using only a single 128x128 sprite sheet. All assets were to be included on this one sheet... I have no real reason for this limitation, It just felt like an interesting idea at the time, and then when revisiting the project I figured why not, who doesn't love a good challenge.

Notes

• Unlike the original game, you are not required to return to the surface in order to save your game progress, it can be done in the pause menu at any depth.
• As in the games sequel (Super Motherload, Available on Steam). You can drive over holes on the surface, and must press down to drop into them. This was a quality of life change in the sequel which I rather liked and so chose to include in this demake.
• Whilst technically the font in-game is a separate font file to allow using the unity font system instead of trying to deal with a custom sprite font thing, the entire character set used in the font is also included in this 128 texture to try and remain faithful to the spirit of this limitation).
  
• Whilst the actual Gameboy required any tile or sprite to be 8x8, I have taken some liberties here with several UI elements being 8x8 or smaller, and then employing slicing in Unity to stretch them to a particular area. Given this game is just intended to be in the style of a Gameboy game and not strictly bound by the technical limitations, I figure this is fine.