Project links
Overview
STACC is a 2D puzzle game developed in under 48 hours for GMTK Game Jam 2021 using Godot Engine 3, which was my third game jam. The player has to navigate through the mazes by moving the character around.
Whenever the character moves, their previous movement will be recorded and stored into a stack. After three moves, the stack will be full and the character will not be able to move anymore. To regain the ability to move, the player must empty the stack, but in doing so, forces the recorded movements will be replayed consecutively and unstoppably. The game reached top 16% in overall rank.
Design and Development
In this game jam, the participants must adhere to the theme of the event, which was "Joined Together" and the theme could be freely interpreted by the participants. Driven by that constraint, our first objective was to answer the questions "how should we interpret the theme?" and "how should we design the game around our interpretation?"
We brainstormed by expanding on both the idea and workings of tangible objects and metaphorical concepts. For example, some of the initial ideas were based on chains, adhering to their nature to "link" certain things; what should we link? What should be joined together?
As the design question expands, we needed another constraint. Another constraint was time, as we only had 48 hours to deliver a complete game. We opted to create a mechanically simple game, but at the same time allows us display our creativity in our design. As the result, we decided to develop a puzzle game with a flexible mechanic that we can exploit to increase the puzzle variation.
We arrived at the concept of data structures. We draw inspiration from the data structure stack/queue. The idea is to store the movement of the character into a queue and when the queue is fully filled, they can not move anymore. Instead, they have to empty the queue, but by doing so, forces them to replay all of their previous movements.
With the core mechanic defined, we can add variations to it: we introduced holes for the player to fall into, we introduced blocks so the player can bump to it to keep their location, and we introduced rotation tiles, making all recorded actions rotated.
This project was a collaborative effort involving 4 people. In this project, I assumed the roles of both programmer and designer. Additionally, I provided assistance in creating the game's visual assets.
Reception
The game ranked top 17% in the overall category out of 5676 participants in the competition and has received positive reviews from other participants.