Project Duration
Nov 13 - Nov 15 2020
Overview
Coming from my first Game Jam with a good hit, I wanted to continue the drive of partaking in more game jams in the year. As such, I signed up for the next Game Jam I had an available weekend: Mix and Jam 2020.
The theme of this game jam is to mix up two generes that normally do not go together and come up with a solid game in 48 hours. I was excited to see how this will play out, so I started right away, with the end product called Blocker Blunders.
Small sample of the core game loop
Blocker Blunders is a falling block puzzle game (akin to Tetris) turned into a 2D platformer. In other words, the goal of the game is to create a bridge of blocks formed via placing blocks strategically, jumping and maneuvering the levels.
I was inspired by the recent surge of puzzle games in the market at the time, specifically Tetris 99 and Puyo Puyo Tetris, but also wanted to flesh out a genre that I really enjoy playing, which are platformers.
Screenshot of the puzzle mechanic
Design Goals
Like the first game jam, I decided to go solo on this project as well, since I wanted to apply my lessons learned from the first game jam. Planning out the project was actually the easiest part of the project, since I got to my core idea rather fast.
Initial brainstorming component
My other idea I had was:
- A resource management game, turned into a survival horror genre where the player has to work at a restaurant, serving up food to rabid paparazzi.
This would have been fairly challenging to implement as a single developer, since this requires both a decent AI as well as a game system of acquiring resources. Plus, there would have to be some form of game balancing, UI indicators and a game loop that might balloon up the scope of the project. Hence, I scrapped this idea and went with my second idea (the platformer puzzle style), but one day, I would like to revisit this concept.
Once I got the idea down, I approached the project the same way as last time: outlining what needs to be done and in what order. The big mechanic I had to work on was the seamless transition between the platforming part and the puzzle aspect of the game.
This alone took a lot longer than I imagined, which ended up costing me some time in level design and/or scrapping some additional content.
Day 2 of what needed to be done
Conclusion
While I did end up making it to the deadline, this project challenged me in the following aspects:
- Always plan for the art at the start, even if it is a rough concept
- Be concise with the game mechanics so that scope creep won’t happen as easily
- Level Design earlier in the process, it saves time to build levels near the end
One aspect that I am particularly proud of was how I made use of tilesets in Unity to build the levels. Since I was on a time crunch near the end, I needed a fast way to design levels for the player to play on.
This is where I decided on using tilesets to build my levels and this saved me immense time to playtest the game right before the deadline arrived. It also helped make my levels look seamless despite being very simplistic.
Screenshot of some platforming
While the finished project has some rough edges, I enjoyed the end product. It allowed me to really think more about project planning for game jams as well as consider what needs to get done.Plus it allowed me to work on some of my other skills as a game developer like art, level building, and UX design.
The game is available to play on itch.io, so feel free to try out the game yourself!