Rainbow Hero – my new game

After some very long and slow, mostly after hours, development I have finally released my new puzzle game – Rainbow Hero:

The game is an old-school type of game as far as mechanics with some painterly stylized graphics and a fairy tale style audio.

          

One of my primary gameplay inspirations for Rainbow Hero was Stone Age – a game released for PC DOS in 1992. I remember when I played it with my father on my old good Intel 486. Years later, I played it again with my wife. Both times it was a lot of fun. Clever, often seemingly impossible, puzzles and lots of cool ideas.

  

Another inspiration was Lasermania – game released in 1990 for Amiga. I liked the general idea of reflecting lasers but I considered the game prohibitive as far as difficulty level. Even though I am a patient kind of gamer and I love solving puzzles, I got stuck on some of the very first levels and didn’t want to continue.

    

There’s a couple more inspirations including general pushover mechanic as well as some totally original ones. I’ve always loved playing puzzle games and I guess with Rainbow Hero it is my attempt at gathering together some of the most interesting puzzles that could be applied to grid based levels and putting them together into a game.

    

One of the cool things that I am particularly happy with is time rewind feature that simply lets you go back in time – either when you get stuck or just want to try different approach. This isn’t anything new – games such as Braid use this a lot (and not just for purely time rewind) – but it makes the game a lot more player friendly.

Time rewind in action

In fact, it was pretty straightforward to do code wise. All I had to do was to store game state for each frame. Then, with ‘rewind’ button pressed, the game gets continually restored from past states. A little bit of work went into optimizing memory usage, so that the game state is small enough I can safely store hours of gameplay.

If you’re into serious puzzle solving Rainbow Hero might be the game for you. It is already available on Steam and directly via game website. And if you happen to play the game I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.