surasshu

i participated together with ash (bsky) and alex (instagram) in the block falling jam hosted by davemakes of mixolumia fame! we came up with the idea of dropping pieces of a PCB board (yes i know that’s a pleonasm, _{but actually no because you’re literally dropping pieces of board, ^anyway…}) and components, and then wiring them together. the result is the above game, and you can play it for yourself by clicking this link!! read below for more info on the game’s development…

we initially set out to create a completely different game involving marbles… but we quickly realized that the concept we had in mind would not qualify in any real way as a block falling game lmao. in our initial discussion, alex brought up the idea of basing the game on PCBs, and this was exciting to all of us, and quickly became the direction we went for.

For a good chunk of development, we conceived the game as having two separate modes: one where you drop blocks into a blueprint, which you would “lock in”, and then go into “wiring mode” where you trace the components together. (side note: we also learned that the copper lines on PCB are called “trace”, which is a very cool name indeed.)

but partway through the week, ash brought up a very simple point: switching between dropping blocks and drawing trace would break the flow state that is so typical of these kinda games. instead, wouldn’t it be better if we could do both at the same time? yes, it would! this completely changed the direction and resulted in the game you see above, and despite some understandable game jam jank it’s really fun! we had additional ideas such as having bespoke components for each brand, other game modes, etc. but inevitable time crunch prevented us from realizing this completely. tbh i think it works as is anyway!

for my part, aside from assisting in brainstorming about the game concept itself, i spent my time doing music and sound design. because of the PCB nature of the game, i pitched the idea that there are several “brands” that are represented by a logo, a color scheme and music. i went ahead and wrote songs throughout the week that would fit with various themes, such as a toy/bootleg game company, a transhumanism company and one focused on nanobots, among others. i managed to include 8 and a few extra songs on top of that! i focused primarily on a sort of sci-fi or futuristic feeling but drawn from an early 2000s vibe, kinda like how they thought the future would look and sound like. (stay tuned for the soundtrack release, soon……)

the game ended up actually being pretty hard in my opinion, but the above run is pretty decent and shows some of the brands and of course my music. let me know if you try it and if you were able to see every brand!