10 Minutes Guaranteed!

Project header image

Game Jam Project

Tools

  • Unity/C#
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • FL Studio

Timeline

  • April 28 - April 30, 2023

Project Description

10 Minutes Guaranteed! is a short puzzle game about delivering pizzas on time, created for the Ludum Dare 53 game jam. You take control of a pizza deliveryman tasked with delivering pizzas to customers, however you must do it within 10 moves or less. This project was created within 48 hours and received top 50 out of more than 3000 entries in the jam.

Play 10 Minutes Guaranteed!

Puzzle Design

Every puzzle is designed to have one solution that takes exactly 10 moves. The puzzle complexity increases as the game goes on, up to a total of 10 levels. The first few levels were designed with teaching the player about the mechanics in mind, with the latter levels being the most complex in terms of how to solve them. In total there are 10 levels in the game.

An in-engine screenshot of the first level, which is just a straight line. This teaches that the player has to go from the pizza shop to the house.
A screenshot of the 9th level of the game, showing how the puzzles get more complex as the game goes on.

To increase the depth of the puzzle design, I added two mechanics to the game: cars and pickups.

Cars act as moving obstacles that move as the player does. They will often block the player's path, so the player will have to move in a way that they won't run into the car. If a car and the player enter the same space in one move, the puzzle is reset.

A screenshot of the 4th level of the game, which introduces cars as a potential obstacle.

Pickups increase the movement speed of the player by one tile, effectively doubling their movement. Pickups also have their own move limit that the player will have to play around for certain puzzles.

A screenshot of the 6th level of the game, which introduces pickups. This level is a copy of the first level, except it is extended with a pickup in the middle, so the player will be able to intuitively understand its effect.

Takeaways

This was a short project I created to test my level design and instructional skills, teaching the player about how to play the game without stopping the game or making them read too much. I also used this project as a way to test my own ability to scope a project properly and be able to create a fully polished game, something I had struggled with in the past. A simple project like this was a really good exercise for that, and I believe I succeeded as the game was among some of the best received games during the whole of Ludum Dare 53. I'm very proud of that result and what I was able to achieve in just a short amount of time.