Calaverita

It's el Día De Los Muertos and you need to get back to the land of the living before the night ends! Move colorful papel picado blocks to navigate the afterlife and visit your loved ones.

This is a short game I made in two weeks for a game development class. My original idea was for a puzzle-solving roguelike, which I didn't have time to fully develop, but you can see the remnants of it in the infinite mode. My goal was to figure out a way to generate levels such that there would always be a path from start to finish given a certain sequence of moves. In order to do that, I tried creating a random path, adding additional blocks around it, and then performing several moves in reverse, but inverting moves proved to be a challenge. Ultimately, I just ended up scrapping my algorithm since it wasn't fully working and placing blocks purely randomly throughout the level, which can sometimes create levels that are impossible to get through.

The dedicated levels I ended up designing in one night right before the assignment was due (ah, college). Still, I think they manage to make effective use of the game's simple mechanics, and there are even a couple levels in there which I've seen give players that "a-ha!" moment that puzzle game designers so deeply crave.

All assets were created by me except for the audio.