Fortress Knights is a retro style single player “battle royale” platformer.

It was created over 48 hours for Ludum Dare 44. Where the theme was Your life is currency. It happened to fall pretty close to the Gameboys 30th anniversary so I wanted to tweak my game to pay respect to it.

Them theme was a bit underutilized as I intended to have a greater scale of buildable blocks in the game, but only implemented one. Your have to spend your hit points in order to build blocks.

Main Features:

Limited Palette (and themed UI Frame)

To achieve the look of a gameboy game I rendered the whole scene using greyscale materials, then put it through an image effect to map the value to a texture of the 4 gameboy darkness values. This way I could tweak the contrast of the whole game by either altering the 4 material colors or by changing the look up texture.

This works ok enough for a pure flat game, but doesn't really convey the look of an actual gameboy screen. If I had more time I would have liked to make a shader to separate out and see the pixels and screen material the way a real gameboy had.

Limited Resolution

The actual gameboy had a resolution of 160*144 which would be this big on your current screen.

Not very useful for playing on a modern computer screen. So I rendered the normal 3d scene to a render texture of 160x144 then the screen effect above was applied for the color.

Finally it is stretched 4x scale on a UI Canvas (640x576) and layers above the frame.

This limitations of this method is that I give up control over the exact pixels being rendered in the final view if using a 3d model.

Capped FrameRate

Performance on many handheld games that were ports of higher performance games often had some large sacrifices. I didn't want to make the game actually feel poor to play, so I only used this in the intro skydiving scene. Where the framerate is locked to a very low 12 frames per second. Which while playable really makes you feel like you're waiting for the hardware to catch up.