Stack Stress

Prototyping

The game jam theme was about mental health and our team brainstormed ideas until we stumbled upon the idea of the stressful process of managing your daily workload and trying to puzzle your schedule together.

We all agreed on a more visceral movement for the different blocks, but we didn't know which kind of implementation would feel better to play. To solve this problem we decided to have two block movement implementation prototypes, one physics-based and one grid-based, so we could playtest the difference. This took up the bulk of our time but it was important to test assumptions, we initially thought the physics-based movement would be ideal but from the prototypes. We found that the physics-based movement was too difficult and frustrating to control, especially when trying to rotate the blocks, freeze them in place, and collisions with other blocks. The grid-based movement did have some issues but they did not seriously interrupt gameplay, so we proceeded to continue development with the grid-based implementation.