The Game
┌[ ‘ ‘ ]┐ is a a game where you have to solve puzzles in order fix a broken facility and move through its rooms. Each room is a maze which has an exit door, a broken electric panel and some broken robots that can be pushed around. Fixing the panel opens the exit door, but also activates the robots, which start moving forward and can easily block your way out.
Features
- There are no words in this game, not even in it’s title
- Even without words, the game still tells a short story
- The game’s graphics are entirely monochromatic
- All of the visual assets were created by the development team during the game’s production
Development
This game was developed at the 2020 Global Game Jam, an event where participants all over the world get a “keynote” and then develop a game about it., this year’s keynote was “Repair”, and was made as a 3 person group. It had a lot of self-imposed design challenges, and those were pretty important to make it a really unique and charming game.
Firstly we had the keynote: a game about “repair”. The event that year had an optional challenge of making the game playable independently of language, so we added the restriction of making the game using no words. Then we also decided to take the additional challenge of making it strictly in black and white (no shades of gray). We decided to work with 24×24 pixel sprites, which would allow us to create decent assets pretty fast, but can be a bit hard to add detail, specially with the monochromatic palette. To make it all possible, we utilized the RPG-Maker MV engine with little to no external scripts, which allowed us to add many features quickly, but also reduced the flexibility of using a more general engine, like Unity.
Producing it was really about creating an experience that felt complete, even with colors and words missing. I focused on creating the mazes, and also on making sure the art was easy for the player to understand. I also created the wordless story of the player helping fix a factory that brought life to the robot that gives name to the game. Its a pretty short game, it has 4 levels where we explored a progression of difficulty with the mechanics we developed along the 2 days. It was a really satisfactory project to work, and I feel like it succeeded at it’s task to be a short but complete game while being able to fulfil its development goals.
Release Date: February, 2020
