BOND is an evolution of the classic Sokoban puzzle game genre that introduces new and fresh game mechanics that challenge the player’s creativity and problem-solving ability. The core point of the game is to provide as many “eureka moments” as possible, where the player comes to rewarding realizations in almost every level.
The way I went about trying to design puzzles that give this experience was by taking inspiration from the ideas pioneered by Jonathan Blow when he designed the puzzle games Braid and The Witness. His approach to game design has been called “Designing to reveal the nature of the universe”, which maybe sounds pretentious, but in practice it boils down to trying to figure out all of the interesting things that can happen with your game’s mechanics, and presenting your findings to the player in the form of puzzles.
A concrete example of how I used this design approach in BOND is when I added cloners to the game. Cloners let you make copies of other objects, and after playing around with them for a while I figured out that if I made a lot of copies of a stone-block I could build a bridge out of them. This realization led to the design of a level where a wide gap is blocking the player from reaching the goal, and the only things that they have on their side of the gap is a stone-block and a cloner. To solve the level, the player needs to figure out the same thing that I figured out when I designed the level, which is that they can build a bridge to cross the gap if they clone the stone-block enough times. This feels like a true discovery for the player, because it actually was a true discovery for me when I designed the level. All 64 levels in the game have been designed this way, and they take the player through a journey of discovery and surprise, which is a polished version of the same journey that I went through when designing the game, and which contains all of the “eureka moments” that I personally experienced.
During the game’s development I have been studying at Lund University, and taken courses in physics, filosophy, psychology and math. This has given me a broad perspective of how people in different scientific fields think, and I’ve found an interesting similarity between solving puzzles in BOND and high level mathematics. The way a mathematician has to reason about an abstract object and try to figure out its applications and consequences is very similar to how players have to reason about this game’s mechanics, and figure out how they can be utilized. The difference however, is that high level math is very inaccessible and difficult, whilst I’ve worked very hard to make BOND as approachable as possible. All visuals and UI elements have been polished until they sparkle, and the difficulty of the levels has been tuned very carefully. The game is covered by a beautiful music score, composed by Dennis Qvarfordt, who also designed all of the incredibly satisfying sound effects.
Maniac who writes all code from scratch without using an engine. Goes on spritual adventures when designing video game puzzles and comes out as a different person at the other end.
Master of making air molecules vibrate nicely. Creates beutiful music scores on request and has a box of special rocks that sound "just right" when they fall on the floor.
I (Gustav) have been programming games in my spare time since 8th grade, and I'm currently in my third year at Lund University. I had a one year old prototype of a sokoban game lying around, which had really interesting levels, but terrible graphics and no sound, which I decided to polish up and try to make into a real game. During this process, a friend got me into contact with Dennis, who was (and still is) working as a sound technician, but who tinkered with sound design and music in his spare time. As luck would have it, he also was a huge puzzle game fan and was thrilled about the idea of trying to bring this game to life. Half a year's work later and the game is as of writing this two days from being released on Steam!