Rocket Mouse

01Brief

Teach light theory without it feeling like a lesson. Players should feel like they're just playing an arcade game, and learn how light mixes without noticing.

02Research and concept

The idea came from the mouse itself. A mouse has three buttons and light has three primary colours, so each button became a colour: left is red, middle is green, right is blue. I wrote a full design doc and an asset list first, and used them as the source of truth for the whole project.

The core loop is matching under pressure: dodge, match colours fast and build combos. You hold buttons to mix, release to fire, and the plane glows the colour you're charging.

Match under pressure

Hold the right buttons, release to fire, and free each Shade with its exact colour.

15 seconds of Level 6, mixing colours to free the Shades.

03Prototype

The first prototype tested steering: is it easy to fly the plane with the mouse while clicking?

04Development

Ships, nine Shade types, two bosses and ten levels are data assets, tuned in the Inspector.
Dialogue with portraits for Rocke and Luma, and eight cutscenes.
A level map with one to three stars per level.
Scripts that check every art file for size, frames, alignment and tiling before it goes into the game.

Each level teaches one new colour: red, green and blue, then the mixes yellow, cyan and magenta, and finally white. A wrong colour makes the Shade 1.8 times faster for one second, so guessing is punished but not deadly.

Tuning in the Inspector

How hard mistakes hit, how each ship feels and how each Shade moves.

Art direction

Retro pixel art at 640x360. The backgrounds start grey and gain colour as the game goes on. The music and sound effects were made with Google Gemini.

05Testing and iteration

Level 1 felt too slow, so I sped up the enemies, shortened the gaps and made the finale bigger. Friends and classmates also found:

They couldn't hear the effects over the music, so I rebalanced the audio.
The planets on the level map looked off-centre, so I re-placed them.
The middle click is hard to press. That one is still open.

I also tried 128 px ships, then went back to the original 32 px.

06Outcome and learnings

The controls are the lesson: holding two buttons is mixing two lights.

What I learned

The best way to teach something is to build it into the controls.
Checking every art file by script caught mistakes before they reached the game.
The first level decides whether people keep playing, so it has to be fun fast.
Trying a big change, like 128 px ships, and going back taught me to trust the original plan.