Quite Blocky

Created for the 2023 GMTK game jam with the theme of "roles reversed", the player becomes the environment within this platformer. Traversing a level, the player must use the environment to their advantage to reach the end. It can be played here.

The Design

Given that this was for a game jam, there was limited time to flesh out and create a game (3 days). This was also a solo project so resources were even more thin than would be normal for a game jam. Thus, the typical routine of creating a design document wasn't a possibility. Things had to be done off the cuff and it shows.

So how was it done? Well, the first thought that came to mind when I saw the theme was a platformer where instead of being a player jumping on blocks, you instead became blocks. It reminded me of Kirby and from there my mind went around thinking of all of the possible mechanics that could be made.

Blocks that could roll. Blocks that could float. Blocks that could attach to certain surfaces. Shrinking and growing. Weird shapes to fit odd gaps. Even combat mechanics where you could turn into spikes or maybe a flamethrowing block in order to defeat enemies. All of these ideas appeared in my mind, but I had to choose the ones that were feasible in the time I had and could create a satisfying experience. All combat mechanics were thrown out as I decided to focus on the platforming experience. I also decided on one level as having multiple would be too difficult for me to program as I would want each level to feel satisfying to play. Thus, with those thoughts, I went to work.

The Struggles

With time being so short, I could only implement a handful of possible mechanics that needed to be easy to understand and relatively easy to create. I also didn't have the time for a tutorial, so I opted for an implicit approach to teaching the player. For every block the player could become, I tried to surround it with others of the same block that conveyed the mechanic. If the block floated, then I had other blocks with it that floated. If it attached to a spinner, then other blocks of the same type would be attached to a spinner. Then in later parts of the level, I hoped the player would have remembered this and realize what needed to be done.

The good news is that this seemed to work for the most part. I received no feedback that the game was difficult to understand and that meant people figured out what to do. The issues that were reported were a symptom of time. There were numerous bugs that were simply oversights. For instance, I had a ball that could be accidentally nudged and lost forever. My reset button didn't work properly as it just put the player back to the start instead of resetting everything in the scene. Things like that, things that were easy to fix, were the most common things reported. Testing would have been invaluable for this, but time and my own lack of experience lead to these issues.

The Meta

Another thing I learned was the metagame of game jams. You want to have your games be in HTML and embedded on itch. The reason is that people are rightfully untrustworthy and do not with to download random .zip files. It also requires more time and commitment to download, unpack, and run compared to loading a page and clicking play. Because of this, any expectation of my entry getting the traffic needed to win awards were very low and I only realized this after exploring other entries. It's something that I think every future dev thinking about doing a game jam should keep in mind. Cover images and screenshots are also very useful to catch the attention of people as they won't be clicking on every game to give it a proper play. People judge books by their covers. It's simply a fact of humanity.

Overall

Overall, it was pretty fun. I learned a lot about game jams in general and had some experience in what a code sprint could feel. Rapid prototyping was quite useful in order to test and debug the mechanics of the game, but I failed in testing the game as a whole which led to the issues described above. I'm quite proud of what I did though and the implicit tutorial seeming to work was something that made me happy. It is a technique that I hope to polish and use in the future as I believe tutorials to be quite boring and can break immersion. Having implicit tutorials can use gameplay to mask the tutorial and make sure the player is immersed in the game immediately. I also believe that such learning sticks with the player more so than explicit explanations of mechanics and such. People tend to skip those and later need to look up said explanations again later. Those are my thoughts and I hope to do more game jams in the future, hopefully with other people.

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