The Negative Zone, the game 1 assignment by Paul T. Rubritz.
Sometimes balls just need to be collected, and sometimes you have to travel to a different dimension to do this. I tried to capture this in my game.
I wanted to make this game as simple to make as possible. I started off by making a game box with a graphical representation of the cursor which the player can move around. From there, I went about placing different circles in the environment, randomly assigning them to be in either the negative or positive zone, so the player would have to swap back and forth between the two to collect all the balls as fast as possible.
To make the game more interesting, I changed the cursor to display the balls that you collect as you collect them in a ring around the main cursor circle. I also added an element of randomness, so every couple seconds the balls change location and possibly dimension, making it more difficult for the user to collect all the balls as fast as they can.
Traveling back and forth between dimensions and being able to see the balls attach to your cursor as you collect them make ball collection much more interesting and sweet.
My resulting game is somewhat fun, as it does fulfill my goal of collecting balls in multiple dimensions. Keeping everything in black and white was definitely a good choice, to further show the contrast between the negative/positive realms. There is definitely room for numerous elements of gameplay to be added. Originally, I envisioned this as sort of a puzzle game instead of a straight-up speed game. But I didn't have time to do that. Ideally, the game would have contained random walls placed in the dimensions that would require you to swap to the other dimension in order to get around them.
One thing that didn't totally work was the random switching of dimensions that the balls go through. This makes it so the player could potentially stay in the same dimension the whole time and collect all the balls, even though to do it the fastest way requires switching dimensions. The game could probably use a better ending too, rather than just the player getting to see the completed ring of balls. A display of the time it took to complete the game would probably work, but I just don't have any more time to work on this game.