In 2016 I became interested in learning how to create games. My explorations into this previously had been fairly tame, creating a text-based adventure game in QBasic when I was around 10 and then a Java GUI dungeon-crawler type game in university for some coursework. In 2016, Unity was free and used C# as the language of choice, which made it perfect for me. I watched some online tutorials on how to make games and got started!
I quickly realised that although I had the programming knowledge on how to create a game, what I lacked was the graphical ability to create assets. Instead of purchasing a pack of assets, or attempting to gather what I could from free resources, I decided to make the actual visuals for the game as simple as possible, using graphical primitives like squares and circles (the game was to be 2D for ease on my first attempt).
I landed on the idea of shapes entering the screen from the left and moving towards the right. The player was to tap on the shape before it exited the screen on the right. Simple enough. I wanted to add a bit of complexity so there are different game modes, and also I wanted to make it look stylised, so the shapes had a certain colour palette and glow and would explode in retro but futuristic ways when hit.
The result was Color Explosion.