Obfuscape was a large expansion on a game idea I had attempted before, a gameplay loop consisting of rapid-fire prompts where the player had to answer basic math problems incorrectly in rapid succession, unless certain conditions were met that they had to suddenly answer the question correctly instead. In the original version, called RunaScape, the player would be required to answer the math question incorrectly unless the answer contained a “7” in it, as “7” was a lucky number.

You can see videos logging the development of that game in the early stages and the finished product

I had always wanted to expand even further on this game, in essence Obfuscape is a spiritual successor to RunaScape, though with a drastically different art direction and narrative tone. Now, instead of trying to purposefully fail a mad-minute style math quiz, hoping to get detention so that you can avoid your aunt’s horrific experimental baked goods, you are actively attempting to thwart campaigns that do harm to a far greater number of people.

Done away with the “lucky number” conceit, I was able to adapt the intuition-challenging mechanics of having to answer incorrectly in one instance and correctly in the next to a far greater number of puzzles, as the need to answer either correctly or incorrectly was communicated to the player along with the question.

The first, and admittedly only (in the current version) expansion was rock-paper-scissors prompts, where the player needs to answer which symbol would either lose or win against the given one. I hope to add more types of games as I further learn the ins-and-outs of the godot engine.

I had attempted to integrate all the feedback I had recieved when presenting early builds of the game, where originally whether or not the player is meant to answer the question correctly or incorrectly was indicated by a colored square at the bottom of the screen, the indicator was instead changed to the question box itself, which also made room to add symbols that helped better communicate to color blind players what was going on. Early builds also lacked the timer bar or any sort of sound effects that kept the player invested.

Public assets used, all of which are licenced under CC-0 (Effectively public domain):

The CRT Shader was an asset pack made by perons, themselves using CC-0 assets credited in the page

The correct and incorrect chimes were made by JapanYoshiTheGamer at FreeSound.

all other assets were made by me.