Devlog #4 How we made a match-3 puzzle platformer

Hey there!

Glowkeeper is going to release in a week, so make sure you wishlist it to get the notification.

Anyways, this is the devlog I’ve always wanted to share for a longest time, the story of how Glowkeeper came to be.

One of the things I hear often is “I’ve never seen a match-3 puzzle platformer before”, and it’s true! I was pretty surprised that we managed to come up with such an idea. So here’s the full story.

Childhood Dreams

As much as I hate to admit to, most games start with a thought like this: what if I made something like <insert game here>, but I add on this other mechanic?

For me, this game was 4 Elements. Yes, I used to play a ton of games from Big Fish Games, and this was one of them.

Despite being a casual game, it was actually pretty interesting, and the link-3-or-more mechanic felt a lot more interesting than the typical swap and match-3 mechanic like candy crush and 95% of match-3t games.

And so when it came to my turn to brainstorm new game ideas, I thought what if I mashed this up with platforming? So you would control a player character, and then there would be a rising hazard where you have to jump as high as you can to avoid.

And just like 4 Elements, I was imagining other mechanics like how collecting elements would give you mana for that element, and that would allow you to cast different spells.

And so, Glowkeeper would be an arcade game where you try to jump as high as possible!

The First Prototype

And so, I spent maybe a month making the first prototype? It looked something like this:

How was it? Honestly it was a bit fun for a while.

Then it got boring, so I added voids to make it harder to match. It was fun for a while but it got boring again

So I added a rising ice to add time pressure. And it was once again fun for only a while.

Eventually, I realized the situations you were put in were very same-y, and the strategy for tackling the game is just to find the nearest earth block that seems plausible to get to, lower it, and jump there.

And so I was about to throw away the prototype entirely. But I just showed it to a friend for fun. And to my surprise, she said the few tutorial puzzles I made were more fun than the entire game itself.

It sounds kind of silly in retrospect, but at the time I never expected this system I created would lend itself better to puzzles!

Puzzles Puzzles Puzzles

And so, using the existing system, I created some puzzles. And slowly I discovered some interesting interactions through combining the link-3 and puzzle platforming.

Eventually, I realized that the player’s position was an interesting aspect of the game, and so I wanted to create a element that requires the player to interact with the element itself. This eventually became the rock element.

I let a friend and some strangers from the thinky-puzzle-game server play the game, and to my surprise, they liked it!

And so I guess that was when it hit me, I have a game! Now what’s that’s left is to flesh everything out

If you’re curious, the original set of puzzles were made in an excel sheet, which I somehow still have.

One Big Map

Initially, the prototype was just a bunch of self-contained levels. But around this game, I started playing and watching a ton of other puzzle games like Baba is You and A Monster’s Expedition, and I fell in love with meta-puzzles and metroidbraina elements.

I love the sense of “this game is more interconnected than I thought” I got from these puzzle games, and also just other exploration games too.

And so I started brainstorming ways in which I could surprise the player through the environment of the game, rather than just puzzles of the game

And so I littered these ideas throughout my next prototype which was one big world, with a few puzzles that kind of required you to solve across several rooms at once, and when people saw a scroll out of the way, they would really crack their heads to go and figure out how to get it.

That was the green light for making Glowkeeper one big map, and I think by this point, I had a pretty good idea for how the gameplay of Glowkeeper would be like.

Reflections on the design process

For me, Glowkeeper was a really eye-opening exercise in game design. There were so many lessons from game design that I’ve been watching from Youtube (I’m looking at you GMTK), like letting games design themselves, and combining genres.

But putting all of that into practice is really something different.

I guess for me, writing this is kind of like a journal of the entire game design process that led up to this point, and hopefully for other devs who are starting on this journey as me, it could give some insight as to how I did it?

Of course Glowkeeper is far from a perfect game or even anything revolutionary, but as a game that was practically a one-month throwaway prototype, I’m really surprised to how far we managed to push this mechanic. And one thing I can say we’re pretty proud that we made a game that’s kind of nothing like anything out there.

Anyways, that’s it for this devlog!

Thanks for reading!

If you’ve still here and you intend to get Glowkeeper, it would help a ton if you left a review! When we hit 10 reviews on steam, that’s when it starts showing as Positive and we can reach the game out to more people :)