Totem Tussle - Solo Developed Puzzle Game

About

The game involves a series of levels where you must battle a unique enemy. Each battle is broken down into 3 phases:

  1. The “Reveal” phase in which the enemy army is revealed. The army will consist of different color coded groups of varying numbers.
  2. The “Build” phase in which you allocate your totems to 3-5 islands. Each island is color coded and Totems added to each island will take on that color.
  3. The “Battle” phase where each color group faces off on the island of the same color. Whoever has more units of a particular color wins the island. Win all islands to beat the level.

Beat all levels to win!

Development Details

Created over the course of two weeks, Totem Tussle started as a "back-of-the-napkin" design by my brother J.C. and me. After implementing this design and designing a few levels, it was clear that the core concept needed some design changes. I went back to the drawing board to identify some ways to improve the game and ended up greatly simplifying the design. The following technologies were used to build the game:

  • Engine: GameMaker Studio
  • Languages: GML (GameMaker Language, similar to JavaScript), GLSL
  • Graphics: Adobe Illustrator
  • SFX/Music: Logic Pro X
  • Documentation/Design: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Excalidraw

Development Documents

Here are the informal documents that I used when developing the game. These document my vision for the game from first idea to level design details.

Retrospective

The Good

As my 3rd completed game, Totem Tussle marks some significant areas of improvement for me. My experience developing my previous games helped the creation of Totem Tussle go very smoothly. I felt like I had very good approach to how I coded each system. As a result the project felt much more cohesive and clear throughout development. From start to finish, I felt much more confident in my overall vision of how I was going to build the game.

This game outshines my previous work in a few key areas:

  1. The music is much more focused and fitting of the tone and pace of the game than my past games.
  2. The totem selection and battles are nicely tactile and satisfying.
  3. The game's art is probably the most palatable and consistent I have put together.
  4. Playtesting went very well. The game took a huge leap in quality after playtesting with a few people.
  5. Though not perfect, Totem Tussle's game design is much more approachable and concise than my last game, Mega Mecha Matrix.

The Not So Good

Though I have improved in pretty much every area of game creation with this project, there are still a few aspects of this game that I am not in love with. The game's design flaws offered me the most notable lesson learned, which will definitely help me on my journey toward creating truly fun and engaging games. The major lesson was that the game design needed to be scrutinized more before diving into fully developing the game. Though I spent some time trimming down and refining the original design, there were a few key questions I should have asked myself before setting out to program the full game.

Firstly, I should have really pondered what the strategy of the game would boil down to. Though the game was initially supposed to be about memory, after creating the game and playing it, it became apparent that the entire strategy boiled down to "count the squares." I don't think this was the most entertaining gameplay, and if I had thought through the game design more thoroughly, perhaps I would have come up with something a bit more intriguing.

Secondly, if your game involves numbers as part of the core mechanic, doing some basic math and running through example scenarios can help decide whether the design works. I wish the initial design conversations had included some simple sketches to show how certain situations in the game would play out. Looking back, I find it surprising that we did not do this during design. I suppose this is a case of over-relying on the assumption/intuition that our design would be fun.

Finally, I think that even if the main goal of your game is very simple (i.e., win the majority of the islands), you should still state it clearly. During a few playtests, it took some players too long to understand what their aim was. Deciding how much "tutorialization" to include in a game is always a balancing act, and I think I may have not added enough in this game.

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