I just had a blast developing “Escaping the blue carpet” for this year’s GMTK Jam! It’s our first ever actual puzzle game! We’ve at least secretly enamored the puzzle genre and at the same time feared it for its unknown, mysterious aspects. And now, having successfully created one in just 50h is invigorating!

We took the first day of the jam to just discuss ideas—no developing until we arrive at something neat and manageable! The time sacrifice may seem big, but the reward was clear: we had a game designed in a way we could clearly see it from start to finish.

Ever since the first concept, we were confident that we could do it. For me, one thing that was crucial to make this whole process to go smoothly was having the tools and a practical ideal. While I, the programmer, was setting the project up with basic mechanics, the artist was making concepts and defining the mood and the level designer was creating levels on paper and testing them using actual dice and play-testing them with us! No one was stuck waiting for someone else to finish their work.

But of course, the jam is that period of time when random things just start to go wrong: the git went crazy on us (or we went crazy on git) and some progress got lost; our level designer had to leave most of the last day for a personal emergency; even the gas ran out and couldn’t bake our lunch pizza! And we really didn’t have much time, specially because we did not start actually developing the project until the second day.

By the end we had 15 levels ready to be implemented but only managed to include 7 levels. We also had 4 nice (puzzle) mechanics designed and working—on paper—but, of course, we could only include 2 of them, the simplest ones: dragging and rolling.

In the end, we are very happy with the results! Even with the simplest of mechanics, we believe it’s still interesting and has a lot of potential for growth! We are already making plans for what didn’t make it in the jam version, and likely there will be updates! So if you dig this game, stay tuned as there might be more blue carpets to escape from!

And thank you for reading! 💙