Gungliss

A chaotic puzzle game that adds guns to the classic block-stacking formula.

Overview

• Date: Fall 2024

• Duration: 4 Months

• Role: Solo Developer

• Genre: Puzzle

• Platform: PC

Feedback

For this project, I aimed to focus on player feedback, a system I often overlooked in other projects. As the defining feature of this project, the gun system was the focal point of my efforts. To add to the frantic, chaotic feel of a fast round of Tetris, guns have heavy feedback when shot, including sound effects, a muzzle flash particle, and making the screen shake and flash. Additional effects were added to increase the feeling of destruction, such as debris particles when tiles are destroyed and bullet holes in the background when a shot misses any elements in the foreground.

Balance

When it comes to balancing the systems, the biggest challenge was figuring out how to inject additional difficulty into the game. Even with limited ammo, simply adding a gun to the standard Tetris formula is a strict decrease in the challenge. On top of making the game start at a faster speed than typical games of Tetris, I added mechanics that would push the player to use their gun for things other than simply carving out optimal plays. The crates do this in two ways: First, destroying them is significantly more ammo-efficient than destroying standard tiles, as they take only one shot to break rather than three, and their ammo drops make destroying them a net gain in ammo for the player. Secondly, combining four of the crates in a 2x2 shape merges them into a big crate that holds a new weapon, an exciting reward that usually requires the player to place tiles in very awkward positions that must then be accounted for. In addition to the crates, some tiles are “zero-g,” making them fail to move downwards when a line below them is cleared, creating unwieldy gaps that must be cleared by using the gun.