First game iteration: Blind ball game

Inspiration to this comes directly from Chris Ramsay's puzzle-solving Youtube channel. In his channel Chris solves brain teaser puzzles, which sometimes contains a "gravity puzzle" — usually a small hidden ball that you need to guide through a maze without seeing the ball or the maze.

The game loop

So after a few iterations this is what was the result: You hear the marble roll by rotating the whole board. Think of a blind ball-in-a-maze game.

Here's the game. Play by dragging the screen to rotate the board and try to listen where the marble travels.

What to learn from this?

I also tried to make the game from the ball's perspective, but turns out it's hard to sense walls without seeing them (unless you're a bat).

A traditional platformer can guide the player by visual indications or collectibles like coins or stars. In a blind environment you cannot have multiple targets that make noise, because the player does have really hard time telling the difference between them.

Even in the final iteration it was not that clear where to go — you randomly bump into a star, but still don't know what would be a good next move.

The inputs must be simple. I tried 3d rotations first and it was way too hard. Like trying to solve a rubik's cube without ever seeing it. Limiting the rotation to one axis helped a bit, but the invisible spinning game board isn't the most intuitive thing to wrap your head around.

So all in all it was a good first iteration of a game without any graphics and it teaches a lot about the genre.