Sandwich is a small game I made in December 2022 with Godot 3.5. My goal in making this game was to create something similar to one of my favorite puzzle games, Yoshi for the NES. I played this game way too much on the 3DS, and I abused save states to max out the score in the B-type mode. It may not be hugely popular like NES Tetris or Dr. Mario, but I think it has the makings of a great puzzle game if only a few things were changed.
Yoshi has an interesting way of increasing difficulty as the game goes on. Every level, there is a calm part and then a storm. During the calm part, you get 2 things at a time, but during a storm at the end of a level, you get 3. In addition to this, the speed slowly increases throughout the entire level until the storm starts. At this point, the speed slows down and speeds up again until the end of the storm.
I like using both speed and number of things to increase the difficulty, but the changing nature of the speed makes it hard to tell how fast the next line will be. It also makes it impossible to differentiate between levels just by looking at what is happening; this is possible in Tetris. So with Sandwich, I wanted to make each level feel distinct in terms of difficulty. To do this, I gave each level one constant speed, and a certain number of ‘storm’ lines with 3 ingredients to go at the end. From one level to the next, the speed may increase or stay the same and the number of 3-lines may increase or stay the same. This way, the speed of the next line can be predicted by the player.
Before putting this game on the website, I wanted to add a few things including the title screen with the falling food. Going back to Godot 3.5 was pretty trippy. Man using signals was such a pain! Also, my old code is awful!
This game is certainly not perfect. I only made eight levels, there are missing animations, and the UI is misaligned. It’s possible I’ll come back to this game and get it to a more finished state with the knowledge I have now. For now though, this will remain as a fun little passion project from the beginning of my game development journey.