Participated last time in a four-person team. This time I will be the only programmer, sharing two artists with another programmer making his own game. It’s… confusing. I plan on using libGDX, and can hopefully figure out how to export to HTML5 before the compo so that I can get more people rating me like some object.

I’m making a puzzle game for the compo. Originally was going to do the jam in order to utilize art resources, but with this theme I thought that I could do it alone. I… think I was right!

This is a game where you try to turn all the blocks off. Similar in vague concept to lights off, but it plays much differently. In this build you can reset the level through the pause menu, which was the biggest impediment to playing that people have had. There’s a special mode unlocked at level 14, which I thought was easy. People have a hard time getting there. I think that I’m going to make an initial menu where you can choose to play either mode…

http://gracefulcode.com/LD48.jar

Game: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness

Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness (ECC from now on) is a puzzle game where you try to unravel a mess to reveal a pristine white grid.

What Went Right

• It’s… fun! This became a negative (read what went wrong) but it was actually fun by the end of day one.
• The removal animation gives it some flavor.
• I added in very basic logging so I can tell when players are finding things difficult. I can’t tweak the difficulty for purposes of the competition, but I will as I turn this into production-quality game.
• libGDX. It brought with it one minor negative (performance/quality of HTML port) but brought an incredible amount of positives. And I’m not even sure what other engine I could have used that would have made better html5 output without me giving up a lot of things in return.
• I created a YouTube video of my playing it shortly after the deadline and put it on the page. People do seem to get it a little better once they see it being done.
• Put the flower mode in the main menu. It originally swapped modes at level 14. According to my stats, the highest level anyone has played is 10. It would have literally been wasted if I hadn’t made this change.

What Went Wrong

• People don’t get it. My internal stats say that more than 50% of clicks in level 1 are wrong. Level 1 literally takes a single click to beat, no matter what difficulty you choose. It needs a tutorial badly. I knew this, but didn’t make the time for it.
• The HTML port is especially ugly, slow, and error-prone (if you block flash it doesn’t load at all, even though it only uses flash for audio).
• It’s ugly. It got to fun (for those who know how to play) quickly, and I spent too much of my time “play testing” or polishing mechanics instead of polishing visuals.
• I suck at marketing. I spammed Twitter and the IRC room, but have mostly failed to drum up much attention.

Early screenshot: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness

Video of me playing it: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness