BOXSTROSITY

Description:

Just a classic box pushing game, get your box to the correct spot! How hard could it be? But wait you can only move in one direction! That's where the magnets come in, use them to join multiple blocks together and gain more control!

Controls:

• WASD - Move
• Space - Grab
• R - Reset
• Escape - Return to menu

My thoughts

The art came out pretty good, its intended to emulate the feel of a Gameboy game with 16x16 sprites and a 4 colour palette. I think these limitations really help to hide my lack of artistic talent.

I love how splitting the levels into different worlds with different palettes and music tracks turned out. It really helped break the game up and stop the look getting boring. I tried to make worlds feel unique. World 1 is a tutorial to teach the main mechanics, World 2 is simple puzzles to give a good feel for how things move, World 3 then introduces immovable blocks to create more complex puzzles. Most of the game is quite easy but the last few levels start to become challenging, I think World 4 would have to have bigger levels to be able to keep the difficulty increasing. I also worry that there are only so many colour palettes I can use before things start looking ugly.

I probably spent to much time on the menu and level select screen for such a small game, not much point in saving your progress between sessions when there are so few levels. I had a lot of fun rendering the spinning cube though.

I think the main failing is the lack of level variety but it turned to be extremely difficult to come up with unique ideas. I think this could be solved with larger levels of varying shapes but that would mean zooming the camera out and then the pixel size wouldn't be consistent so I feel it might compromise the style but I'm yet to experiment with it.

I tried creating my own music but after a couple of hours I hadn't made much progress so I ended up borrowing some tracks from Pix. Sound effects are generic sfxr which work but are pretty boring.

Overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out.

(Title is meant to be like monstrosity but with boxes)