See You Laser
You can play the game here!
For my third semester at the UE Berlin I had to create a game each week, and this game was made for the theme "Physics". At this point I already had a bunch of weekly games behind me and I saw a pattern emerge: My games tended to be more narrative/experience driven artsy games. And I did all the code on my own - even though I didn't consider myself a coder, I just teamed up with people even less confident in their coding capabilities. So for this iteration I wanted to both work on something gameplay oriented and I wanted to work with someone on my level at coding, i.e. neither no experience nor zero confidence. So I called up my friend and fellow student Marie Wispler!
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We started out by discussing different directions of the "Physics" theme. We thought about fun tilting jigsaw puzzles, the crazy stuff quantum physics can do but ended up looking into lasers - at the time I was experimenting a bunch with lasers at home! I had a pretty clean top down puzzle in mind, and we chose to go 2D as Marie felt more comfortable drawing this way. The idea was to have a drag and drop casual puzzle game, something we've both seen many times done in many different ways. We had a clear idea of the workflow and what needed to be done! Marie especially helped organise that workflow by doing to-do lists and protocolling discussions, letting me understand the importance of project management even in small scale production.
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Our brainstorming on the online whiteboard miro
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Playing around with the laser.
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We split the workload into many different smaller parts, and distributed them according to our strengths. On the coding side I looked into making a proper physical laser, while Marie set up a drag'n'drop system. On the art side I made a moodboard and thought of the general vibe, while Marie put these thoughts into action by realizing the assets. Lastly, on the design part, I designed the levels and added some juicy gameplay feedback.
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While I felt in the end that this project wasn't necessarily as large or as ambitious as other projects in this weekly gamejam, I am very proud of our general work structure and flow. This was by far the best organised project, there were no points of incredible stress, no night shifts - and I am very happy with what we ended up with! We created a game that is easy to iterate upon, as the laser code is built in a way that is very malleable. It has a distinct art style and some first levels teaching the player how to play.
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The moodboard, taking cues from Portal and Minimalism
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