Design Goals

Over ten years ago I made a small puzzle where you rolled blocks.  I mean I made actual physical wooden blocks.  I printed the grid that was the puzzle board on some cardstock.  The goal was to roll a block so that it ended up in a certain location with a certain side face down and touching the grid.  I made a few different grids and had a few people try them.  The most interesting puzzles included two blocks instead of one.  The smallish board felt a bit crowded and the most challenging part of the puzzle was moving the second piece out of the way so you could roll the main piece where it needed to go.

When I decided to make this into a computer game, I was working from the concept of this original hand-made puzzle.  I've seen quite a few games where the player rolls a block, but I think that most of them miss out on what is likely to make a puzzle interesting.  Often the player is rolling just a single cube onto a target square.  Rolling one cube is a nice way to introduce the concept to a player, but it doesn't have the depth needed to keep challenging the player so these games end up adding mechanics like jumping, bridges, or elevators.  I wanted to be different and my theory was that by designing the block-rolling in the right way, I wouldn't need to add auxiliary mechanics.  By having multiple blocks to roll and by using several different block shapes, I hoped that there would be plenty of puzzle variety and complexity to keep players engaged.

When encountering questions about how things should work, I tried to consider depth as well.  For example, should the player be able to roll a block that's off-balance?  It might be good if the player could always roll the block since it might cut off too many possibilities otherwise.  But I decided it was better to require the blocks to be fully supported because that gave the opportunity for the player to use blocks to support other blocks.  Emergence is often the key to true depth.

I was still worried that there wasn't quite enough to keep the game interesting for the real puzzle die-hards.  But then I had another idea...