The basis for Team Tumble was Boulder Dash, a game in which you play a miner collecting diamonds against time, whilst avoiding but cleverly utilising falling boulders and enemies.
Sokoban and Boulder Dash combined game loop
Ideation
In one of the ideas I came up with, I combined Sokoban and Boulder Dash, essentially a game where you need to make boulders fall into specific spots to finish the level by digging dirt from underneath and pushing the boulders around.
The second idea was inspired by the location of my home university, LUCA School of Arts in Genk. It sits atop a decommisioned coal mine, and in this concept, you would need to dig for enough coal and escape before the time runs out. The catch is, the timer is oxygen inside the mines, so instead of a global timer, it's local timers, visualised by canaries in the level, which are either standing (still enough oxygen), falling (barely enough), or dead (time ran out for that particular area).
Coal mines game loop
Different sizes of character game loop
In a third idea, I played around with the size of the player character. What if, instead of only one block, you could suddenly dig through what is essentially four blocks of dirt?
By using the sparsely distributed powerups to grow and shrink in size, you would have to dig to a hidden treasure, and escape the level before the time runs out.
In yet another concept, I played around with the amount of characters. Why only have one, if you could have more? This idea stuck, and I went on to prototype around it.
Prototyping
With a clear vision of what my core game mechanics were, I started prototyping. At first, I worked with an object oriented approach, but that quickly became a burden, especially once I implemented the boulders. They need to know when another space is either occupied or about to be occupied in the next update.
Object oriented prototype, where objects didn't know about each other
Very early in development, I decided to switch to using tile maps in Unity (my first time, actually), which required a rewrite of my whole project as it was at that point, a task I am very glad of achieving.
Colour Palettes
Once the game was in a working state, my focus shifted towards the visuals. At first, I just updated the so-called "programmer art" to something more coherent and nice-looking, but afterwards I started experimenting with different colour palettes. I tried out different wild ideas, like black & white, a colour palette inspired heavily by Baba is You, and others, until I ended up with a nice and vibrant one.
Tile maps prototype
UI
Up until now, the user interface had the default white boxes from Unity, but now that I decided on a colour palette, the UI received a visual update too.
Playtesting
During the whole development of Team Tumble, I made sure to extensively playtest the game, to make sure the learning curve was perfect, and the levels were doable.
And with that, the game was ready to be published! You can now play the 8 levels coming with the game on Itch, or at the end of this page.
