Back in June of 2021, Game Maker's Toolkit held a game jam that myself and few other friends decided to take part in. While I was happy with the game I made, I for some reason never posted about here. And between Harmonix getting acquired by Epic later that year, things got so complicated that I just shelved it. But after hopping back into Unity for some ProBuilder practice recently, I came across the old project in the Unity HUB. And after opening it up, I thought better late than never. So here Circuitry: my long-lost game jam.
What It Is
The theme for the game jam was "Joined Together," which I thought was pretty solid for a puzzle game. The idea I went with was loosely inspired by an old Pokémon internet game called "Joltik's Super Circuit." The concept of the game was that you swap pieces in a block puzzle in order to create electrical currents between two points. I actually played this game a lot back when it was still on the website, so I was pretty excited to make something inspired by it.
Rather than just recreate the game, I wanted to change up the goal a bit. In Joltik's Super Circuit, the goal is to rack up points by using as many pieces as possible in a connection, all while you have a limited number of moves to get as many points as you can. Instead of doing that, I decided to simplify the goal, and just make it "connect all of the outlets to the provided power source." Otherwise, the mechanics were basically the same where you select one piece, and another to swap it with.
The game was entirely coded by me, and in a way that if I ever wanted to revisit it, I could make as many levels I wanted (whether or not I actually do that is yet to be determined). I also made all of the art for it in Illustrator, and put together an interactive how to play screen.
Retrospective
It's a little hard to do a retrospective since I made this game over two years ago, but if I had to do anything differently, I wish I could've gone bigger. The base concept was good, but by itself, it felt a bit too simple. Otherwise, I was really happy with how I got those features together. It eventually got to a place where I could've made a big amount of levels.
Anyways, I'll be keeping this one short since this is a project from so long ago, but if you want to try the build out yourself. You can download it here. I am hoping I can make another puzzle game soon, so hopefully that will be on the horizon.