Hello everyone, this is our first ever devlog update which I have had on my to-do list for a while!

About 3 years ago I started developing my game engine, mostly as a side project for learning but sometime during this period the engine became mature enough to use for real things and this is the first real project that is being created using all the work I’ve put into that with the help of @cariiinaav doing the graphics.

Brainroll is an ice sliding puzzle game inspired by the ice gym in the old pokemon games where your movement consists of sliding on ice until you hit a wall that stops you from sliding. Using this mechanic the goal is to complete the different puzzle levels that we’ve created and escape the ice cave.

The game has been in development since June 2021 and like I said it is the first real project built using the engine but also my first real game project as well. Since I have limited experience with game development I had the idea that I want the community involved as much as possible to receive feedback and learn how I can improve but also as a medium for me to share with others what I learn on the way.

With this first devlog I wanted to share the plans moving forward, Brainroll was released as early access here on Itch io and the reason for this was mainly because I had a new year’s resolution for 2021 that I would both create and release my first game. I didn’t have time to bring Brainroll into the exact polished state it deserves so I thought I would continue the development more in the open. As of now, Brainroll consists of the following list of features:

• 25 Pre-made levels with more to come
• 7 Different mechanics that can be combined to create interesting puzzles
  • Walls that stop your movement when you collide with them
  • Coins which you have to collect all of to complete the level
  • Teleporters which takes you from one location to another
  • Spikes kills you if you collide with them
  • Slimes make you stick and stop your movement when you collide with them
  • Bombs that you have to defuse before the specified number of rounds
  • Small brainrolls which stick onto you and follow your movement like an extension of yourself.
• Deterministic design
• In-game level editor to allow you to create your own levels to share with others

For the future I have put together this list with things that I know that we want to put in the game or do with the game moving forward:

• Story and cutscenes
• About 200~ levels
• An overworld type of level select
• A scoring system, right now we’re thinking of a 3-star type of system depending on how many moves you made on the level.
• Various editor improvements
• Credits screen
• Optimizations
• Various graphical updates

We will try to ship smaller updates in development sprints, with or shortly after each release we will try to make a new devlog update with what is going on for the upcoming update. This way we allow you to be as included as possible in the process.

Sprint 1 (Estimated to take around 3 weeks):

• Oskar
  • 25 Levels using new mechanic (Will try to Livestream most of it and add some content to youtube)
  • Helper designer tool to aid in managing various graphical aspects of the game during development.
  • Bugfixes
    • In the editor, the top left tile is cleared when placing a player spawning point or a goal tile.
    • Game crashes for levels that are missing walls around the map. (For this I am planning on adding a new “mechanic” to the game which is a sort of out of bounds event that is triggered if you slide out of bounds which is a new fail condition that can potentially create some interesting levels)
  • Story preparations
• Carina
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • Market research
    • Discussion and evaluation of results and potentially assigning new tasks to improve the game.
  • Work on new graphics

If you have any questions, want to report issues, or share feature requests please do not hesitate with getting in touch with us. Leave a comment or reach us on our discord channel: https://discord.gg/cZc6G4Ffm9

If you’re interested in following the development of the game you can also follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nullssondev