blipo

blipo is a simplistic 2D Puzzle game. The aim is to move the player from the starting point to the finish tile. I have never made a puzzle game before. This was something completely new for me and I thought the freestyle week would be a great opportunity to just go for it.

The game's forte is that its rules are extremely clear. You have:

• 1 player starts on bottom left tile
• 1 goal win condition, always top rightmost tile
• hazards lose condition met if they are on same tile as player
• neutrals can be used to traverse the level, not harmful

The entire game revolves around solving small to medium-sized puzzles in as few turns as possible. I wanted to make sure that the player was having fun while also maintaining a challenge for them so I used extremely short iteration cycles while trying to make puzzles deep enough that they could not be solved through basic brute-forcing.

In his book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design", Raph Koster writes about something he calls "groking". This is where a player intrinsically absorbs a game's mechanics in order to gain the ability to understand and replicate them. His theory trudges along the lines of "if you're learning, you're having fun" and that once a game has stopped teaching you, it becomes stale.

This, as well as concepts of "flow" inspired me a lot and I always wanted to make sure that my puzzles were filled to the brim with grok and consistently immersed the player completely.

Furthermore, I desired to keep the game very pure, that's why I used primitive shapes instead of sprites or models. I didn't want any distractions during game play and I needed to make sure that even the shape of something would be meaningful in identifying it (see Bouba-Kiki study)

Designing a solid game: "What does the player feel when they see this? What do they feel when..."

I believe in using an emotional approach rather than a numerical one for game design.

Technology Used:

Game made entirely in Gamemaker Studio

All music was composed and recorded in Sunvox

All Sound Effects were made in SFXR

Game Icon and Banners were designed in GIMP