Puzzledorf is released this week on Steam! And is, of course, made with Unity.
About
An elegant, block-pushing puzzle game with clean design, exploring the question, “What makes a good puzzle?” Set across multiple, beautiful worlds in a bright, colourful pixel art style. Includes colour blind options.
Design Philosophy
This game follows the philosophy: A good puzzle is something that looks simple, is easy to understand at a glance, but the solution surprises you. It teaches anyone how to play, helps grow your puzzle solving skills and slowly challenges you.
The Goal
Push the correct coloured block onto the correct target space. There are moveable boulders that have no goal, but are simply obstacles.
Also Includes
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Beat your own high scores in trying to complete puzzles in as few moves as possible
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Make a mistake? Undo your actions
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Challenge yourself with Mirror Mode once you beat the main game
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A relaxing, cool vibes sound track (in-game)
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Colour blind options
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Display options for different screen sizes
Can you win?
For those who might be interested in development related information, here are some of the tools used in the project:
- For creating levels inside Unity I used a combination of the Unity Tilemap editor and Super Tilemap Editor.
- For controller support I used Rewired off the Asset Store. It was much smoother to create controller interfaces overall than InControl which was used in older experimental projects.
- For Pixel Art graphics I used a combination of Pyxel Edit, Photoshop and Piskel the online website. I have also tried Pro Motion but found Pyxel Edit suited me better.
- For editing sound files I used Audacity.
- Sound was generated through a combination of FL Studio and BFXR.
- For video editing the trailer I used Adobe Premiere.
- Trello was used for keeping track of daily to-do lists and setting up tasks for 2 weeks at a time, aka “Scrum” or “Sprints” or “Agile Development”
Further Unity Development Thoughts
I have also discovered that Unity is really painful when it comes to 2D and pixel art, especially placing any kind of graphics in the scene if you’re not using a tilemap, ie, setting up UI. There may be some assets that improve this on the store that I have yet to discover, beyond Super Tilemap Editor.
Using the correct settings on images and sound files was also the most dramatic thing I did for optimization, ie, making sure you don’t use the default size for images in the import settings but manually setting it to the smallest size possible.
In fact Unity made my mp3 files about 5x larger with the default settings. I had to change whatever the default Loading Type was, I think it was Decompress On Load, to Streaming. Apparently the CPU has to work slightly harder (negligible) but it dramatically reduce final build size and the amount of RAM used up.
