REORDERED

Description

REORDERED is a puzzle game where the player must reorder letters moving in a 2D space by interacting with the environment, in order to form an imposed word.

A given word is decomposed in letters that are sent at regular intervals from an emitting antenna. A letter travels in straight line until it reaches an element that affects its trajectory. The player can enable and disable those elements in order to guide the letters into a certain direction.

Letters eventually arrive on a receiving antenna to compound a word again. Some trajectories being longer than others, letters are effectively reordered by the timely toggling of interactive elements, causing a new word to be created.

The game consists of 4 levels defined by:

• a tilemap containing elements that affect the letters’ motion, some fixed and some that can be toggled
• an initial word sent
• a goal word that the player must recompose by reordering the letters

Features

• 4 levels with a word to form
• Mouse control
• Debug keys
• Simple graphics
• Simple BGM and SFX

Playing instructions

Either use one of the download links above, or go to the itch.io page.

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Mouse	Sprite
Start emitting letters	X
Toggle interactive element		Click on interactive element
Restart level		Click on top-right Restart icon
(Debug) Previous level	Left arrow
(Debug) Next level	Right arrow

Screenshots

Context

I made this game for the Global Game Jam 2018 on theme Transmission. As all the jam sites around me were already full, I took part in the event unofficially and the game is not registered on the GGJ website. I also wanted to start making games with PICO-8 (which uses Lua) so I thought it was a good opportunity to try the fantasy console.

After the jam, I spent 4 more days to improve the game, adding 3 new levels, music and sound effects. You can read more on my micro post-mortem.

Role

Level design

I created 2 maps with 2 challenges each, for a total of 4 levels.

Programming

To find valid English anagrams, I wrote a Python script to permute letters in words taken from a list of English words. I only needed to run it offline, at design time.

I wrote the whole game code in one PICO-8 Lua file. This was a very small project, but I managed to add a few things that usually don’t make into jam code:

• Coroutines (to send letters periodically and delay visual/audio effects)
• Unit tests (with simple assertions on game start)

Helper code eventually made it into my own PICO-8 framework, pico-boots, which I used for further PICO-8 projects.

Other

I made my own “programmer art” to represent level items and created simple audio inside PICO-8 for player feedback.