I really like the idea behind the Week Sauce game jam: instead of encouraging you to forego sleep to make a 24 or 48hr deadline, Week Sauce invites you to take a week – not necessarily of consecutive days – and submit what you get done, whether it’s ‘finished’ or not. I think it’s a much better way of fostering creativity – you have limited time, which helps to reduce second-guessing, but not so little time that you have to postpone real life.
This month one of the themes was “ShapeShift”, which immediately put a puzzle game idea in my head. I put a prototype together in Unreal, since that’s what I mostly use these days. Unfortunately my PC died before I could make a packaged build, but since it had only taken a couple of days to make, I decided to port it to JavaScript.
Postmortem / Future Plans
The game needs a lot more levels. I’ve tried to arrange the few that I have into a vaguely progressive order, but there are still huge gaps (most notable before the last level!)
The graphics are simplistic but not very far away from what I’d consider finished – I think this kind of puzzle is better abstract than stylised (it’s about coloured blocks, not e.g. gems or fruit or whatnot), but the graphics could definitely be made a little less obviously-coder-art. I’ve tried to disguise that a little with the scaling flash you get on clearing a colour, but that also needs particles.
The one thing I kept changing my mind about during development was whether the game should explicitly say “this is the one correct way to solve this puzzle” or just encourage the player in a direction while still allowing them to finish the level in a suboptimal way. Initially I tried the latter, with a score awarded with a multiplier for the number of blocks picked up at once – that encourages you to make a more complex piece, which is much more satisfying when it fits. But it felt a bit directionless and “sandbox-y”. So I added “remove all of each colour” as an explicit goal – I think the game is much more satisfying overall now, but it made a lot more work for me as I now have to go through each new level making sure alternative solutions don’t work (and deliberately designing them to lead you down the wrong path – thank me later). I missed the encouragement to make complex pieces though, which is why I added the bonus (?) – it’s a little extraneous at the moment; it might just need more celebration (particles etc.) to integrate it better.
It’d be nice to get the game on mobile, just because I think that’s the platform best suited to this kind of “5-minute distraction”-style games, but that requires that I work out touchscreen-friendly controls and make the levels fit phone screens better (probably by making the larger levels rectangular).
Anyway
You can play ShapeShift here. Let me know what you think in the comments. (Also let me know if it even works in your browser/on your platform – I tested the platforms I had access to, but it’s been about a decade since I last wrote anything in JavaScript!)