Babel

A game about laying bricks together, climbing ever higher to scrape the sky, and dealing with the fallout of miscommunication.

Introduction

You are a builder, tasked with increasing the height of a dizzyingly tall tower: Each block you place has had to travel over a mile to reach the top! However, communications have broken down with your fellow workers down below, and they don't always send up the correct bricks you need. You'll have to carefully place blocks piece by piece as they come in... but discard too many off the side, and soon enough the tower will crumble!

How to Play

You have a hand of three cards, representing tetris-style blocks you can place on the tower. You can drag a card from your hand and release it onto the tower to place its block in that location. But be careful! Blocks can only be placed if they're completely supported. If you can't play anything, you might have to discard cards just to draw new ones.

As you play, the tower grows higher but your deck grows thinner. If you run out of cards before reaching a Milestone, you lose! But if you make it to a milestone, your discard gets reshuffled into your deck AND you can draft some new cards for the next milestone.

These new cards can include 'Floating' blocks, which don't need to be completely supported! These can usefully patch holes in your tower that would prevent an ordinary block from being placed.

If you're out of cards and out of options, you might just have to Give Up... but that's okay, as you can always try again!

Credits

This game was created for 1-Bit Game Jam #4 with a theme of Tower and a visual limitation of only two colors.

Matthew Marsland: Design, Code, Art, Audio
Jordan Reece: Art

The font is 'Pixel UniCode' by anonymous-1000937 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/908795 used under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Thank you for playing!

Updates

• 1.4: Fixed Credits button alignment issue and added Block Placement SFX.
• 1.5: Added soundtrack.
• Post-Jam Patch 1:
  • Patch for bug where dragging a card outside the game window makes the card unusable. Now, dragging a card outside the game window drops the card automatically. Also added an edge border to make it easier to stay away from the edge of the game while dragging cards.
  • Moving the mouse outside the play area will now always return the card to your hand, rather than dropping it in the discard or on the tower if those actions happened to be previewed at the time.
  • Fixed camera attachment for world border and input handling for block placement leaking into the drafting system.
• Post-Jam Patch 2:
  • Added mobile support (please let me know if you had any issues playing this game on mobile!)
  • Improved font scaling at various resolutions.
  • Fixed bug where the tutorial and credits could not be exited on mobile.

Dev Notes

This was a real fun project! A nice experiment with a constraining visual style, a return to the chill puzzler genre, and some good practice spinning something up in free time around other work and projects. 

I'd also like to give a shoutout of thanks to my flatmate who kindly played through a paper prototype of this game during the design phase!

In future I'd like to pursue the original goal of this project - multiplayer! The original idea was that you'd have to play this game in a pair, but a la card games like The Mind or Regicide or The Crew, you couldn't talk about your cards or plans - so your perfectly planned block placement might get scuppered, due to a breakdown of communications. Unfortunately as the time constraints increased a system as large, low-level, unprecedented (for me), and cuttable as multiplayer had to go, but it could be worth revisiting if players end up enjoying the singleplayer experience.

- Matthew