So uhh... What?! #1 in fun is crazy! I am very grateful to those who rated my game. Thank you!

So what went well? I think making physics driven games is really a good direction for gamejams. Physics have depth and a ton of fun built in, and turning on physics is just a toggle in most game engines.

Why was it fun?

I think a willingness to break my "vision" helped a lot. Making the game was basically a series of design failures:

Failure #1:

Originally the game was inspired by "Lemmings" as you can see in this gif I tweeted after around 4 hours of coding:

https://twitter.com/kettlecorn/status/1068762210535534593

The idea was you would build stairs and things out of the blueberry people so the other blueberry people could navigate teh environment. Unfortunately I realized that getting their movement to feel fair and fun would just take too long to get right. So I thought about it for an hour or so (precious time!) thinking about how I could simplify it. I realized that blueberries are round, I didn't need to give them legs, I could just make them bounce around. Then I realized I could draw from pinball.

Failure #2:

My new idea was to have the player build a own pinball table with bouncy bumpers. Then once they had the solution they would hold spacebar and fire hundreds of blueberries through the level to the exit. Unfortunately due to the dimensions and mechanics of the platforms I just couldn't get it to feel quite right. Adjusting the platforms never felt fair. The realistic physics wouldn't bounce how you wanted, and the unrealistic physics felt too constrained. I never solved this problem.

Success

So at this point I was frustrated because my core mechanic didn't work well (in my opinion) but I had spent a ton of time. So I just decided to ignore the "core" of my game, reduce the difficulty, and make the game more playful. I reduced the number of blueberries you needed to save on each level from 100 to 5, removing the "core" challenge of my game. By making this change I allowed players to "cheat" instead of finding an actual reliable solution to each level.

I removed a bug fix that prevented blueberries from colliding with platforms while you were moving the platform. It felt like you were breaking the game doing it (and you were!) but it was fun, and the game really needed fun.

At this point I designed the levels to feel more like playful physics sandboxes rather than the tricky physics puzzles I envisioned. The game was a lot easier and more about just playing around. This meant I had to be careful to not make any level too challenging. Each level had to have some slightly unique premise, and they had to be really easy so that people would experience enough of them before they got bored.

Conclusion

I am very happy with the results, but there's definitely a lot I'd like to improve for future jams. I really screwed up audio this time around and my "clever" level loading system completely failed in the final half hour when I tried to make a web build.

But I'm very glad people found the game so fun! After all of my design failures I was really unsure about if the game was fun at all, but it appears it is a lot more fun than I realized!

See you all the next jam!

Try Blueberry Bounce here: https://kettlecorn.itch.io/blueberrybounce