The Square Root Of All Evil (LOWREZ Jam)
The Square Root Of All Evil - Postmortem
I have just uploaded my submission to this year's LOWREZ Jam!
To celebrate my submission (The Square Root Of All Evil), I wanted to summarize my process below.
THEMES:
- The main theme of the jam is to build a game within 64x64 pixels
- I randomly generated a dice-roll to pick one out of 10 optional themes and landed on: Recursive
GOALS:
- Export my first game to HTML5 from GMS2 for future jams
- Practice puzzle game design skills (rules, systems, logic, teaching mechanics etc.)
- Unwind and have fun
Awesome. With limited time and energy to spend on the jam, I started brainstorming. What can I do within 64x64 pixels recursively? (without making things too complicated to implement) I ended up going for simplicity, a recurring pattern of squares within squares. Every four squares combine into a bigger square. The dimensions: 4x4 > 8x8 > 16x16 > 32x32
Next I realized the value or total size of each square wouldn't change in an interesting enough way. This is where the root/squared value system came into play. I made every tile worth its total number of pixels^2. The value of combined squares increases exponentially.
(4x4)^2 = $256
(8x8)^2 = $4096
(16x16)^2 = $65536
(32x32)^2 = $1048576
This is when I came up with the title: The Square Root Of All Evil
The title steered me towards making the tiles and goal of the game "Money" themed.
Re-currency, if you will! ;-)
Then, I started running out of time. The jam-game contains 12 easy/casual levels with (hopefully) a handful of fun ideas and twists. As usual with jams there were ideas for additional mechanics like 'Taxes' to make placement trade-offs more interesting, but alas, no time.
CONCLUSION:
This was fun! I've practiced puzzle game design, relaxed creatively and published my very first HTML5 jam-game playable in the browser.
I hope you'll enjoy my minimalistic recursive capitalism puzzler too.
You can play / rate it here.
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
One of my favourites from the jam so far :D Thanks for the post-mortem, it's super interesting to hear about your process!
That means a lot. Thanks Bryn! :D