Introduction

Solo game development is difficult. It's difficult because game development is fun. The ability to unilaterally implement whatever ideas you want into your own world with its own rules, interactions, setting, and story, is largely the entire draw to making games. That same ability also endangers the project itself. What may start out as a fun concept for a small game can easily become unfocused and its form distorted as more and more dimensions of gameplay are incorporated. In addition to making the game potentially less enjoyable, every new feature demands increasingly more time to develop. The more time a project takes, especially for the solo developer, the less likely it is to ever be published.

When I started BLOB & PADDLE I wanted to keep to a handful of goals the best I could. These goals were informed by my previous experience making several small games as well as listening to many useful videos from GDC and other game developers on Youtube. Here’s a listing and explanation of the game development goals which led to the creation of BLOB & PADDLE.

Goals 

Short Browser Game

The best learning experience as a new game developer has been to finish and publish a project. There are so many concepts to learn and fun ideas to explore that it’s incredibly easy to endlessly tinker with half-baked unfinished concept games. For me, a happy medium between exploring new ideas and maintaining development discipline has been to keep the scope of games small. Developing a browser game intended for itch.io is much less daunting of a task and shorter of a time commitment than developing a fully fledged PC game published to Steam. Even these small browser games take much longer than originally expected - BLOB & PADDLE took 9 months of after work hobby development to finish from beginning to end. 

Another reason I wanted to, and continue to want to, create short browser games is that it increases the pool of people who would play the game. It’s less of a commitment for others to try a free browser game and spend 30 minutes fully completing a free game compared to taking a gamble purchasing a game from an unknown developer off of Steam. A game takes an extraordinary lot of time and energy to develop and I’d be happiest knowing that all of those who wanted to play were able to, without time or money being a limiting factor.

Intuitive controls and gameplay without need for explicit tutorial levels

Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering has stated one of the most helpful things you can do for players is to use familiar imagery for quick uptake of gameplay concepts. In BLOB & PADDLE, classic gameplay of Pong and Breakout are referenced. Many gamers know a ball bounces off of a paddle and that a ball will probably destroy blocks. The main character, being a blob, slides around. The paddle rotates around Blob deflecting the ball to the best of the player’s abilities. If the ball hits the player, the player is temporarily stunned. I think wanting to interact with the blocks and balls, and avoid getting hit are instinctive behaviors for players which don’t require further instruction once the controls (WASD & mouse) are conveyed.

One departure from classic Pong or Breakout gameplay, besides being able to freely move the player (and paddle) around, is the inclusion of enemies. The three enemies, Big Blob, Ghost, and Flyer, are introduced in the earlier stages. The player is given the opportunity to learn the differences between these enemies as well as the three different kinds of blocks, Single Block, Double Block, and Ball Block. Each level which introduces a new enemy attempts to convey the unique properties of that enemy. By the time the player encounters the more challenging levels it’s clear what the obstacles and goals of the game are.

Big Blob’s introduction level has the enemy standing in the way of key points on the map. The player quickly realizes that Big Blog stands as an obstacle deflecting balls as well as attacking the player if they get too close. Ghost’s first level has enemies hidden in dark hallways emerging from their semi-concealed state to attack players based upon a large aggro range. Flyer’s first level has enemies aggressively buzzing around a strange hive-like map which reflects their oddness. Flyers are odd because of their movement patterns and the fact that they are the only enemy which does not attempt to destroy the player, but instead “bugs” them by dragging them to the beginning of the level. Ghosts and Flyers do not deflect the ball which intuitively makes sense since they are respectively translucent or airborne.

Minimal UI and menus

Working with UI is challenging for me so I wanted to make a game that made use of no UI as both a challenge to myself and a time saver. This decision excludes a lot of traditional gameplay options. There wouldn’t be multiple lives, powerups, “stored” moves, score, etc. The level names, which could be displayed in a traditional UI, instead quickly fly onto the screen, pause briefly, and depart upon each level load so the player is aware of in-game progress.

The entire focus of the screen during gameplay would be on the player, the goals, and the obstacles to that goal. During gameplay, the only elements ever on the screen are Blob, the paddle, balls, blocks, enemies, and level walls. This made a straightforward approach to creating different levels and gameplay options since the only variety to player experience would be the placement and quantity of those limited game pieces. I don’t think BLOB & PADDLE in its current scope would be very fun for hours upon hours, but for 30 minutes of gameplay I think it’s as fun as I wished it to be.

Story without utilizing dialogue

A piece of feedback I received from a friend on previous games was that there wasn’t enough story. Even if BLOB & PADDLE was going to be a small game, I wanted it to be a “complete package”. The player should be emotionally invested in the main character even if he was only a 16x16 monochromatic blob sprite. I knew that I didn’t want to spend time creating dialogue systems. Again, this was both a design challenge and a time saver.

I created the concept for gameplay, characters, enemies before knowing the direction of the story. I thought of implying that Blob’s friends turn into the balls themselves and that’s why the balls didn’t outright destroy him when hit. Maybe Blob’s friends in the beginning would turn into enemies and the various enemy types would be different stages of that metamorphosis. That was too depressing though. I settled on a classic rescue story. Blob’s friends would be taken while each level liberated more and more friends. I didn’t know how I would convey the friend-napping, who the enemies were, where the game took place, or why Blob was destroying blocks, but I decided if I the story was ambiguous it didn’t matter as long as I could inject a sense of loss and triumph into key points of the game. All of the emotions in the game’s meager cutscenes were conveyed using existing gameplay animations - the “happy” jump of the blobs when they’re saved, the destruction particles emitted when the player is defeated, flipping a sprite left or right, etc. These small expressions gave me enough room to express the high and low points of the story.

Forgiving and engaging gameplay

I wanted to create a game my wife, Mom, or other family members would enjoy playing and be able to finish given enough time. Early Kirby games stand out to me as a great example of gameplay that is both fun and easy. In a Kirby game, if the player wants to, they can float over every single enemy without exploring different powers. If a player wants to have fun and try out the different powers the game offers them, that’s fine too. The player’s progression is not really limited by difficulty, only by how much fun they’re having and how much time they’d like to spend in progressing. 

When I was first experimenting with the gameplay of BLOB & PADDLE, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the balls or the enemies, or both balls & enemies to destroy the player. When the player dies, the level’s progress is reset and the player has to claw back to where they were before. The balls are the main source of gameplay interaction - avoiding them, deflecting them, using them to destroy blocks and progress. A common term in game design is “find the fun”. The balls in BLOB & PADDLE were the defining part of the game and the main source of fun. I decided that the balls would not destroy the player, only stun them with a small knockback and a funny sound effect. This ended up being the right decision for multiple reasons. If the player was heavily discouraged (by punishment of death) from interacting with 90% of the game, the player would play in fear and become frustrated. Additionally, due to how gameplay emerged, there ends up being more balls than anyone can manage on the screen at once and you will get knocked around. Sometimes the balls knock the player into an enemy, but most of the time you’re safe. This creates exciting and random moments that don’t end in a total reset of player progress. The balls being mostly benign also serves to highlight the danger of enemies that actually can reset the player’s level progress. These dynamics felt appropriate and fun.

Self-made assets such as art, music and sound effects

One of the most important concepts I’ve learned from various gamedev youtube channels is the importance of creating a cohesive visual style. I didn’t want to create an aesthetic Frankenstein of premade asset store sprite packs glued together. I wanted to quickly create sprites for my game elements which conveyed necessary information about the game rather than asset packs which incidentally aligned with the gameplay. I’m not artistically skilled so this restricted me to creating 8x8 or 16x16 sprites (I settled on 16x16). To further reduce the development time of my art assets, I decided to use a two-color palette of black and white. This decision drastically informed the aesthetic of BLOB & PADDLE. Even though the game’s appearance is simple, this simple aesthetic allowed me to create end-product assets as I brainstormed and tested new gameplay elements.

Music and sound effects of the game were created on an emulated gameboy four channel soundchip through the software Furnace Tracker. I have previous musical experience playing in high school band as well as guitar, but this was my first experience composing music through tracker software. I used a small 2-octave midi keyboard to input the keys and iterated upon each level’s song for about a day’s time each. In the same way I wanted control over the visual aesthetic of the game, I wanted to personalize each screen and level with its own music. BLOB & PADDLE features 15 short looped songs ranging from thirty seconds to one minute. Even if these aren’t the best songs, it was enjoyable to build out the small world of BLOB & PADDLE through the personalized music and sound effects. 

Special Thanks

I want to specifically thank my wife for contributing content and feedback to the gameplay, character design, music, and levels. She was the first point of feedback and an extremely valuable second set of eyes on everything related to the game. When you're spending hours and hours staring at the same half-baked level you start to forget why you made the game in the first place. Her opinions helped steer the game towards fun at important crossroads in development and BLOB & PADDLE couldn't have been completed without her. It's also worth noting that she was and will be the only person to beat the original extremely hard and unfair version of the game with more enemies, harder blocks, larger enemy ranges, and bugs throughout the levels. If you're developing a game yourself it's important to have somebody you trust to share your work with that can give you an honest opinion. If they're good at fixing your melodies or making cute enemy sprites then even better.

Conclusion

When I initially set out to create BLOB & PADDLE I envisioned it being a small concept test which would serve as a warm up for a bigger, more long term, game. Instead of a short development stint, the game took my life and free time for most of nine months. I used to get discouraged at how long it took to make such a small amount of content - that discouragement led me to take a year long break before this project. In that year I realized how much joy creating something brought me and how much poorer off I'd be without the creative outlet of gamedev. Game development is unique in that it brings together so many different disciplines and synthesizes the different parts into a whole singular creation that other people can enjoy. Nothing else I've experienced is more challenging or rewarding.

Thank you for reading and playing.