Side by Size
Side by Size is a top-down puzzle game where changing your health changes the environment.
This makes each level a tricky balancing act between healing and (purposefully) taking damage to manipulate the environment and reach the exit. The original jam version had 21 levels. The expanded version is still being worked on, but has more than 100 levels.
Ranked 61st out of the 5,729 entries in the GMTK Game Jam 2021.
Engine: Unity
Team: Solo development
Development Process
This was my third 48-hour game jam I had done solo, so I had a pretty solid gameplan of how I wanted to approach it. Still, the process of making this game threw some curve balls at me.
The first step I took was to rapid-fire brainstorm as many possible ideas as I could come up with related to the theme, "joined together." If the high concept sounded interesting, I would try to quickly mock up a really rough example of what a screenshot would look like. As someone that focuses on level and UI design, sketching a screenshot is vital for ensuring I understand the idea well enough to continue.
After I finished spewing ideas, I took a break to get my mind off of those ideas, and come back to them a bit later. Then I picked an idea based on a number factors, such as:
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How feasible is the idea for me to be able to execute effectively in 48 hours
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How enjoyable do I think it will be to make this game
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Does it has the right of amount of unknowns in development (not so many that I cannot budget time well and not too few that it won't feel like making something new)
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How unique is the idea relative to other ideas other jam participants will have
The concept that I went with, as I originally wrote it down, was "link HP to the size of stuff" as a system for delivering puzzles. I had been wanting to make a pure puzzle game (no execution challenge) for a while as a way to flex my level design skills, so this idea was a perfect fit.
From experience, I knew I needed to get the game functioning at a baseline level by the end of the first day. This meant having the character controller, placeholder UI, and all level pieces working in an ugly demo scene. That way I could make a few example levels in morning to send off to a couple trusted friends to validate that the idea was communicating itself well enough and the concept was engaging to play with.
After receiving that vital bit of validating and guiding feedback, I worked on solidifying the final presentation of the game. I am a decent pixel artist, but hardly a fast one, so I needed to put harsh rules for what the art would look like. Do to this, I locked myself to 16x16 tiles that could only contain a single color, so I could make them all in white and color them in Unity programmatically.
At this same time I was adding the laser functionality to the game. For context, the laser is a power-up the player gets halfway through the jam version of the game to turn the growing and shrinking blocks on or off. A way to activate/deactivate the blocks was imagined alongside the rest of the idea, but I wasn't sure the exact form that would take until having a game to play with.
Then I worked on finding music and creating sound effects that would compliment the game's visuals and play. Finding music that was motivating but not too energizing, to promote the amount of action needed for this sort of cerebral game, proved difficult.
I was in the final stretch after making a quick title screen and credits screen. I dedicated the last couple hours before the deadline to just churning out as many interesting levels as I could manage. I used this same approach in my last jam game, but it was more successful for that game (since it was a puzzle platformer and thus involved execution challenges as well as puzzles). I underestimated the time involved with making these sorts of levels, but I was still pleased to reach a solid 21 levels.
It was a good lesson to fully realize that execution challenge inherently brings some complexity to the table, which means that the levels alone aren't providing all of the game's engaging content. But without any execution challenge, the levels require more care, since they are the sole source of engagement in the game.
Post Jam Update
The overwhelmingly positive and humbling feedback a received on the jam version gave me confidence to start work on an expanded version of the game with more level mechanics and puzzles. It's in the final stages of development now, so I'll have more information once it wraps up.
My ugly (but functional!) test scene made in 12 hours, complete with programmer art. This included basic grid-based player movement, the health UI, healing and damaging tiles to increase and decrease health respectively, walls to block player movement and block growth, the behavior for the all-important growing and shrinking blocks, and exit tiles to complete levels.
My mocked up version of a level where the goal was to force players to realize how to they can use the environment to offset their health and the size of block.
And here is that same level with final art in the jam version as level 7. This puzzle doesn't need to take up as much space as it does, however, this was a deliberate choice for a couple reasons. First, by making the level literally take up more space, it makes it more intimidating and, thus, more satisfying when completed. This fit well with the pacing of the game since this is the first level after the invisible tutorial levels and I wanted players to have a boost in confidence after this puzzle to help convince them to keep playing. The added scale also discourages brute-forcing the puzzle since trial and error takes longer.