I’m really proud of this one! The fundamental idea behind Robo Phone Home is that signals take time to get from point A to point B. With this as our guiding light, @Wuppos and I started the dev process with a morning brainstorming session coming up with a game mechanic and theme.

Our early ideas focussed on spaceship—mission-control dynamics on a long interstellar mission, with signals between the two transmitting at the speed of light. But we decided that we wanted to keep both parties on one map where the on-screen visual distance between them corresponded directly to the signal travel time. This didn’t quite feel right for interstellar distances, so we scaled the theme down to a robot and a control tower.

We immediately ran into a challenge: a time delay between input and response is inherently unfun. Our game must have a control scheme that feels like more than just controlling a robot character with lots of input lag. We realised we could get the perfect blend of responsive controls and meaningful signal travel times by centering the game around aiming instructions at the robot. The rest of the game sort of just designed itself.

We spent most of the first day implementing the robot/tower/signal mechanic, and making sprites for the robot, tower, and walls. We tried the mechanic on a test map with just walls to get a feel for what we were making. We discovered that we were making a puzzle game with an aiming mechanic. Perhaps we could call it a dexterity puzzler or a puzzle shooter (please let us know if you have a good idea for the genre name!). We had a second brainstorming session coming up with lots of different types of obstacles and interactable map elements, a small fraction of which we implemented and added to the six levels in our jam entry.

This was my first time making a puzzle game. Now that we’ve gotten some feedback, I’ve learned that it’s far too easy to make puzzle games a tad too hard. Testing your mechanic throughout the dev process through all its iterations actually makes you somewhat good at it and you lose sight of what it’s like for someone who’s just picking it up for the first time.

I want to say a quick thank you to all the folks who played Robo Phone Home, and left us kind words and useful feedback! Another quick thanks to @Wuppos for jamming with me again and lending his unique soulful pixel art style to the game (I have it easy)!