Hi! I'm Corey and this is a post-mortem for "Hiding Spot", which you can find it here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/hiding-spot

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I decided to make a puzzle game where the objective is to run out of space, to view the theme as the goal rather than a threat. That led to the idea of making it about actually isolating yourself, something I have a problem with (and that I imagine is relatable in this community in general). I thought it would be more interesting if you had to somehow close yourself off from above as well, to box yourself in from all 6 sides.

For the sake of working quickly and for lack of modelling skills, I decided to model the player using MagicaVoxel. Again to save time, I decided there would only be 4 states (standing, standing while pulling, crouching, crouching while pulling) and no real animation. I would just randomly tweak the rotation values while the character was moving to give it some personality.

Initially, I wanted to represent the levels as bedrooms, where you're pulling common large bedroom items (beds, dressers, chairs) towards yourself. This presented two problems. One - time spent modelling was time not spent programming or thinking about puzzles. Two - this was a game where the player would often be behind or under objects, so maybe making them opaque was impractical. I could show the player's silhouette when they were obscured, but it would be much simpler to just represent the objects as glass boxes. It was quick, practical and acceptable. At the same time, I decided an orthographic angled/not quite isometric perspective would be helpful for reading the level, while still being clear as to which directions were up/down/left/right.

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I made an ambitious 3D tile-based puzzle game last year, so programming this would be straightforward and familiar. At first, pulling a box meant any boxes stacked on it would move also. I decided that since this was a game about pulling more than pushing, maybe jenga-like behaviour would be more interesting. I think it was the right decision.

I made a simple text-based editor for making the puzzles. It's very crude and limited, but it works.

In my limited jam experience, Saturday night is when I feel the most burned out and creatively brain-dead, so this is a good time to deal with menus/UI/etc, so I did that. I also used this time to record some ambient synth music along with a few simple sounds.

I spent most of the second day making puzzles. The more puzzles I made, the more I realized that there was no way I could come close to exploring the possibility space in this time frame. I made as many as I could and, unfortunately, some trivial solutions squeezed through. I intended to try many object shapes and sizes and perhaps other mechanics, but ended up feeling like I just scratched the surface limiting it to just two shapes (1x1x1 and 1x2x1).

Phew. Anyway, that's about it. Thanks for reading! There will be more of this game, this is just the start. :)