Mirror Block is a game jam game that we submitted for the Global Game Jam 2022 for the theme Duality. We won Best Design at the University of Advancing Technology jam site. The theme Duality inspired me to come up with a movement system where you control two mirrored objects, and the difficulty comes from trying to use your surroundings to navigate around yourself. Things like little holes or corners in the walls can be used to position each block perfectly to fit into the goal space at the same time.

 

Game jams are short 48 hour projects meant to encourage creativity and passion for game development. Since it's such a short period to finish a project, my goal was to come up with one simplistic yet very strong main mechanic, and then use as much time as possible expanding on the mechanic and polishing it without over scoping the project. Once the main movement system and win conditions worked well with no issues, I got right to puzzle design and came up with new ways to make the player think about the mechanics to make the most of a few mechanics instead of trying to cram in as many new mechanics as possible. Any additional content I added needed to reinforce the main theme and mechanic in order to keep the game in scope and consistent. Using this strict approach to what mechanics could be added, I was able to keep the scope low enough for completed polished game in under 48 hours.

There will always be room for improvements, and things that quite didn't make the cut for game jam projects. One of the big things I wish I had done better is make more puzzles with clear solutions. The first puzzles I made used just the movement system and obstacles try and reposition the player blocks. While the first two puzzles feel like they have a clear solution, the final puzzle with this mechanic can be solve by just playing around until you accidentally end up in the right spot. If I were to go back into this project, it would be a goal of mine to make sure each puzzle has only one clear solution, so that the player feels like they solved it rather than just ended up getting it right after a while.

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What I learned from this game jam was to limit scope as early as possible. Just focusing on one mechanic and treating the half way mark of the game jam as the end, leaves you the other half to polish as much as possible and adapt to unexpected bugs and issues. Once we had something we felt was complete, then we went back and started adding new mechanics like a teleportation square and built more puzzles around it. Because of this, we were able to achieve what we planned on and more within a tight deadline.