Powertile, a puzzle game prototype
About the game
If you're new, I should quickly describe the game: Powertile is a short "prototype-sized" tile laying puzzle game. The goal is to make "solutions" for each level using tiles with various effects and powers. Most tiles will "generate power", giving you the points you need to complete the level, but you will have to be smart about placement so you don't go over budget.
Head over to itch.io to give the game a try! You can see earlier posts on this game here.
Powertile 1.0
The timeline
I've slowly been chipping away at this puzzle game project the past 3 months (although with a rather long break in the middle, see below...). A few of weeks ago I decided to set up a final timeline, a "release date" and decided which features to go for. I listed everything I had left to do and divided them into 1.0 and 1.1 (saving 1.1 stuff for a potential future update, although I have no plans to continue development yet).
## 1.0
- [x] modifier system -- instead of changing values to components, add/remove modifiers that are calculated on evaluation
- [x] name and logo :)
- [ ] sound fx
- [x] tutorial popups
- [x] levels...
## 1.1
- [ ] backgrounds
- [ ] FX system -- a list of effects that get rendered on top of everything
- [ ] drawing in sorted layers -- so that components, shadows and effects can overlap
- [ ] detailed evaluation UI (show more stats and each restrictions)
You'll see that I've crossed off some things since — I did manage to get to most of the 1.0 goals, but I never touched audio at all, as that would mean having to learn Picotron's audio design tools from scratch.
The missing month & the dedication
The past three months has been my "garden leave", having been laid off from Thunderful Games in late 2024. As the project I had been part of is unannounced and canceled, I'll never be able to show it off, and I decided it was a good time to make a small project to just have something recent to put in my portfolio. I got off to a good start with this game. Then holiday season came around, and I decided to take a break. In early January, my dear cat Yoko fell ill and died, after 12 years as a constant in my life, helping me through most of my 20s and 30s. So it goes... Anyway, It took over a month before I could get back to work, and even now it's been very hard to make progress. We live in horrible, stressful times, and the creative brain is sensitive (at least mine is). Be easy on yourself and others, and hug your loved ones! I'm dedicating this project to Yoko <3
Approaching balance
At this point, when I made the timeline, the game had most things implemented but was missing a good chunk of content: the different tile types, and levels. I did not foresee how hard it would be to design in this space — in my attempt to make levels open-ended, with many different possible solutions, some types of tiles and strategies quickly became dominant.
The goal of the game is to generate "power" (basically victory points) using the differently sized tiles, and each tile type has a cost. So in short, I had three levers attached to each tile type: power generation, cost, and size (number of spaces it occupies). I went to google sheets and started to evaluate the strength of each type, and it quickly became apparent that shifting numbers by 1 would vastly change how strong the tile was. I had to significantly rethink some of the tiles I had planned, and used one of the tiles as measuring stick — the "Pill" tile is a 1/2/2 (Cost, Power, Size) and other tiles would have similar "cost per space" or "cost per power", although the tiles you unlock later on are in general stronger.
Type |Cost|Power|Tiles|Cost Per Tile|Cost Per Power|Power Per Tile|Points CPT|Points CPP|Points PPT|Points Value
-----------------|----|-----|-----|-------------|--------------|--------------|----------|----------|----------|------------
Pink |3 |1 |1 |3 |3 |1 |2.5 |2.5 |10 |15
Pill |2 |1 |2 |1 |2 |0.5 |7.5 |5 |5 |17.5
Pink (Discounted)|2.1 |1 |1.2 |1.75 |2.1 |0.83 |5.63 |4.75 |8.3 |18.68
Booster |2 |1 |1 |2 |2 |1 |5 |5 |10 |20
Long |5 |3 |4 |1.25 |1.67 |0.75 |6.88 |5.83 |7.5 |20.21
Displaced |3 |2 |3 |1 |1.5 |0.67 |7.5 |6.25 |6.7 |20.45
Chain |1 |1 |2 |0.5 |1 |0.5 |8.75 |7.5 |5 |21.25
Frame |8 |6 |8 |1 |1.33 |0.75 |7.5 |6.68 |7.5 |21.68
Ambrosia |0 |1 |4 |0 |0 |0.25 |10 |10 |2.5 |22.5
Another tweak I did was to change my approach to level design. I already had an implementation of "restrictions", columns or rows in the puzzle that had certain criteria (such as forbidding tile types, or locked to a specific power value). I decided to introduce those much earlier in the game, and that I wanted most of them to restrict the player to low power values (or even 0 in some cases). This way the player didn't just have to figure out what tile types were efficient and apply a blanket strategy to the whole game, but hopefully had to figure out efficient solutions for each level.
Example of restrictions after I implemented the feature
A title
Weirdly, I've been simply called this project "the puzzle game" for the longest time, hoping that both a strong theme and a title would appear as the project matured. It didn't — as time was running out I realised that the current aesthetics, a mishmash of generic rectangle pixel art and 90's desktop interface, would be all the theme I get, and I had to find a title that was suitably generic. I was almost ready to release this as "the puzzle game prototype" but then finally decided on "powertile", because well you place tiles that can generate power. There also seem to be no other games with this title at the time of writing.
