Blokkit

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  Capsule art

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  The starting grid of a puzzle

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  Halfway through, indicators showing which blocks will be filled or emptied

Inspiration

I love daily puzzle games, and have been wanting to make one myself for a long time. The Devvit hackathon proved the perfect opportunity to try my hand at one, while also learning some new stuff about Reddit and Devvit along the way!

My main creative inspiration (or self-induced constraint) was to make the game language independent. A lot of daily games are language based, and thus are biased towards the primary speakers of that language. You might not know the specific word a game is asking for, or some secondary slang use of the word and the game is impossible to solve ruining the fun (yes, I'm speaking from experience as a non-native English speaker).

What it does

The game provides a new puzzle every day, in which you have to fill a grid of squares by placing a set of shapes on said grid. Sounds easy, but the twist is that grid spaces that have already been filled, can be emptied again when another shape gets placed in it! This opens up a world of possibilities for puzzle design, and hopefully provides a nice brain breaker puzzle to the player.

How I built it

The game was built in Unity (C#) by myself. All assets in the game are programmatically created vector graphics so no art had to be made for the game. There is no sound design as of yet.

Challenges I ran into

Uploading the game to Devvit was the biggest hurdle of it all. I probably spent 4 times as long on that as on the game itself. There is no documentation about using Unity WebGL builds within the Devvit environment so I had to get creative. It took me a couple of nights of troubleshooting but I got the game to work on Reddit! (Fun fact, build numer 146 is the one that finally worked...)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting an actual playable game up on Reddit, wow! Creating a game in this short of a timeframe, that I feel really has potential to become a staple in the daily puzzle landscape.

What I learned

Learning to work with a new server infrastructure, a new CLI and game design aimed at a tiny scale (5 minutes per day) instead of the large games I usually try to build.

What's next for Blokkit

More puzzles! Right now there is actually a small number of puzzles in the game because I spent so much time getting it to even work on Reddit. Luckily making puzzles is actually the fun part, and I'll spend some time to create a bunch of them for the future! There can be so many variants on the base puzzle. Different colored pieces that interact differently and different sized grids (4x4, or even 2x5, who knows?), just to name two. This could even be a standalone game with progression through a set of puzzles that grows increasingly harder.

Blokkit could also turn into a User Generated Content game! Building a level editor would be easy and it would allow redditors to build and share their own levels, increasing the engagement with the game.

Built With

• c#
• unity