Blocky

You play as Blocky, a block that traverses through a world of blocks and evades blocky enemies! Your goal is to collect portal blocks and make it through the blocky madness!

1 month

Windows

Unity

Highlights

Learned to architect code around the usage of Unity’s ScriptableObjects
Implemented a full game loop that also saves player state and progression
Implemented various enemy types with unique behaviors
Created fluid object animations and VFX to introduce juicy gameplay

Once target is within range, the Chaser chases

Gunslinger won't shoot if its line of sight is blocked by a non-target

Programming

Throughout the making of this game, I learned more about the best practices for designing, implementing, and maintaining code. It made scripting less tedious as I learned about keeping each object’s responsibilities to a minimum. Specifically, I made sure to have classes know as little as possible about other classes, and that kind of principle helped me sort out the relationships among objects.

Level Design

The level design process for Blocky was mostly simple, as there were no camera movements to pan throughout the levels. It was just inside a large box with the start and finish around the same area.

The only difficult part was trying to create a reasonable level without crowding too many platforms and enemies, which would have made navigating frustrating.

Considering the enemies’ unique behaviors, it was good to know where I could place surprises. The first time the player runs through a level, all the enemies will look the same until you reach a certain distance for each of them. That’s when they show their real colors and attack!

In-engine Development

VFX and Animations

Player

One of the reasons I liked developing this simple game was the fact that animating the blocks and particles was enjoyable! I went for a cartoon look for the blocks’ animations. And, I added responsive animations to the platforms to give players a neat feedback when they touch them.

The glow on the blocks were created from their respective material emission. Combined with post-processing, the overall look of the game feels more like a shoot ’em up-arcade style. The style was definitely what I had in mind, and I think it offered a potential to simulate a chaotic, bullet hell type of game.

I think one of the most important parts of developing this game was to provide a visually appealing, responsive environment. In addition to having to create effects for enemies as well, that gave me more opportunity to play around with the particles.

Enemies