2015 has been a pretty good year for me! I started it ready to release a long-term project, and I’ve ended it not hating that game and having released it on multiple platforms. I haven’t starved, run out of money, or died while travelling, and I’ve been able to hang out with old friends and meet new ones.
This is part one of my 2015 retrospective. The other parts are available here:
Interview: A Good Puzzle Game Is Hard To Build (January)
I love puzzle games. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?
Marsh Davies interviewed me, Jonathan Blow, and Jonathan Whiting about the art of good puzzle design. It’s a good read!
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build - PC (February)
This has really been the year of the snowman, this game bookending everything I’ve worked on this year. Back in February, we released A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build for PC with our “pay what the temperature is” sale gimmick. The response to the game was very positive, though sales weren’t amazing.
This game is as cute and charming as it is only due to the hard work of Benjamin Davis - who, it should be noted, not only did all the artwork but most of the programming too. Many thanks also to Ryan Roth for composing the beautiful soundscape for the world.
Also worth thanking: Droqen and Ian Snyder for a late night conversation that led to the bonus dream world puzzle. Hannah Nicklin and Adam Dixon wrote tweets for the @AGoodSnowman Twitter account. Jake Strasser made the well-received launch trailer. Noyb came up with the name of the game very early into development: it was perfect and stuck instantly. And many others besides! True story: one of the reason there’s no in-game “thanks to” section is because the list would be really long and I knew there would be a good chance of unfairly forgetting people.
Train Braining (February)
It was maybe not the wisest decision to do a game jam with limited internet the day after releasing A Good Snowman, but regardless I’m happy with the game that came out of it.
My first thought when sitting down to make a puzzle game about trains was “but Cute Train already exists!” So I stole the art from that game but made something different with it.
The end result is my least block-pushing-like game in several years, though it’s still a rock hard puzzle game so it’s not so different in the end.
Video: Sokobond post-mortem chat (March)
This is from 2014 but it wasn’t posted until this year because Harry wanted to edit it (n.b. it has not been edited). You can watch the two of us chat about our game Sokobond, at the time recently released on Steam.
I know I keep pushing this back, but Sokobond will be coming to iOS and Android in early 2016.
A Good Tunnel Is Hard To Dig (April)
Staying in Toronto during Ludum Dare, I tried two collaborations which both fell through (though both people made something: Lalyvilley & The Rod of God). I then decided to make something on my own, and happily that turned out better.
This is a short, solid experience. An observation I’ve made in the past is that gravity is a fantastic game mechanic for tile-based puzzle games (see Jelly no Puzzle, Tetrobot and Co., and my own You’re Pulleying My Leg), and this further confirms my theory.
Monstrous Mini Mazes (May)
Despite the familiar 5x5 pixel graphics, this game isn’t made in Puzzlescript - it significantly predates it. I made it waaay back in November 2012, and then sat on it for two and a half years because it was never as good as I knew it could be.
The difficulty and complexity ramps up incredibly quickly - something which I think I could do a better job of now. However, the only way to improve that would be to redesign the level from scratch, which would be a massive amount of work. Eventually I admitted to myself what I always knew on some level - that I was never going to go back to it and that it’s better to have an imperfect version released than a perfect version no one can play.
Thanks to Michael Brough and others for repeatedly poking me to release it. And thanks to Bart Bonte for choosing it as one his top 10 web games of 2015.
Skipping Stones To Lonely Homes (August)
This is the best free thing I’ve made in ages, and if looked prettier I would probably make it not free. However, I think there’s something about the low-res graphics that help sell the weirdness of the mechanics - what’s with these skipping stones that are almost the size of a person yet can be bounced along the water with ease?
I started it at the Develop game jam in Brighton, with the theme of “pebbles”. It owes an lot to the background inspiration of being around people making throwaway comments, and initially I didn’t think it was going anywhere. But each time I tested it I found something new that was catching people out that I’d previously dismissed as trivial, and eventually it grew from a small 24-hour-sized thing to an all-consuming month-long project.
My main regret here is that it looks so similar to Mirror Isles. I’m not sure how I’d best distinguish them though - I can’t make the islands grassy because I have green lilypads that need to be visually distinct, and in any case sandy desert islands just look right.
The main game is satisfying on its own, but I think the hidden treasure is what makes this really special. If you enjoyed the dream puzzles in A Good Snowman, or metapuzzles in general, it’s worth trying your hand at a bit of treasure hunting.
Tentacle thing (August)
Made for Ludum Dare (theme: “you are the monster”), I was inspired by Aaaah! I’m Being Attacked by a Giant Tentacle! to make something similarly tentacle-y.
It’s playable: you can move yourself around and it has a goal state. However it’s incredibly unintuitive, and labourious once you’ve worked out the controls. I didn’t see how to turn it into something good, so I left it at this prototype.
Slime Saga (August)
After scrapping the tentacle idea, I instead decided to make something inspired by Ben’s game about being a gelatinous cube (which he didn’t end up finishing unfortunately).
The art isn’t as squishy as I originally intended, but I think the sound effects make up for it.
This has a more gradual difficulty curve than most of my other Puzzlescript games, which is maybe not a bad thing. After submitting the game to Ludum Dare I made a few more levels, which I initially kept as bonus content exclusively for Patreon backers. These are now included in the game for everyone.
Talk: Fantastic Arcade (September)
I spoke about A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build at Fantastic Arcade. Topics of discussion I ramble through: how the game works, a science lesson about snowballs, the importance of hugging, some tools we used to make the game, and secrets (ooh). It’s fun, mostly unplanned, and worth a watch if you want an idea of the weird vibe of Fantastic Arcade.
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build - Mobile (December)
Getting the game properly optimised for mobile and getting the controls to feel right was a hefty amount of work, but it all worked out nicely in the end. We came out just in time for Christmas, less than two years after starting the project in the first place.
Player feedback is positive, generally people like the controls, like the puzzles, like the atmosphere. We tweaked the post-ending hints towards the dream puzzles so that more people would realise they were there, so I think there’s even fewer “this is too short to be worth that price” complaints.
Mobile sales have been good; we’re not millionaires but we made more on mobile in a week than we did on PC in nine months. Word of mouth has been pretty good to us, though of course the bulk of those sales came from storefront features.
What’s next in 2016?
- Sokobond for mobile
- More small Patreon games
- Puzzletome - a collection of all my Puzzlescript games into a single entity
- Maybe I’ll start some new collaborations? We’ll see…