Add Settings and Final Levels

This is a huge devlog, mostly because this last part of the game jam was extremely chaotic. Now that I’ve submitted my game, I have the time to write a devlog.

After receiving feedback from others, I learned that the pixelation effects could be very jarring for some, but that others really liked the effect. Because I was getting these conflicting opinions, I decided to make this a setting for those who need it, but to keep the effect on as a default. Because this meant I was building a settings system, I also decided to implement volume settings. None of this was super difficult, but the settings had to be hooked up into every other part of the game.

With this out of the way, I still needed more levels. At this point I had 5 levels, which is the amount that I’ve submitted for some other games. However, due to how short these levels are, I wanted to get all the way to 10 levels. Level design is certainly not my strong suit, so this took a significant amount of time. I tried to make the levels difficult, but after receiving some more feedback, it’s clear that I probably should’ve made it easier.

With these new levels, I also added a new mechanic—blocks that will flip the rotation direction when contacted. These were much easier to implement than the sticky blocks, but still required me to work on many different parts of the game. These blocks gave me a new tool to use for level design, which helped out a lot.

I made some more tweaks to the export settings, and with about 15 minutes to spare, I uploaded my files to Itch.io. I wasn’t able to test all of the exports, but the web and MacOS versions definitely work, and my game uploaded just fine.

I’m not totally sure about the future of this project—every other game jam game has been abandoned as soon as the jam was finished, but I really like the mechanics of this one. Because of this, I may actually end up fleshing it out more and developing a full game, but I also might not—we’ll see.