Baby sokoban

Result

This is a remade version of my first game in C++/SFML.

It is heavily inspired by the Sokoban game. The goal of the game is to move all the baby bottles from each level onto targets in less than one minute.

You can play this game online here: Baby Sokoban.

My first video game v2.0

I wanted to start this project because I wanted to improve the game. There were indeed several points to address, such as:

• The game’s style: all the first testers told me that the old version was too ugly
• Even if it’s the game, the baby moved way too fast
• Everything was really small, you needed good eyesight to play

How did I approach it?

I knew I could make a better game because I had better tools and support at hand.

First, I had developed a video game development framework in C++/SFML. Concretely, it’s a layer on top of SFML that makes video game development easier for me.

Second, I decided not to work solo on the game this time. Indeed, I posted an announcement on itch.io to see if I could find a graphic designer to help me improve it. Bingo: Antonis offered to help me remake the game for free!

Then, I simply had to organize myself to spend time regularly on game development and finish relatively quickly. So I developed for about 2 hours every weekend.

Running the game in the browser?

This time I didn’t want to do things halfway, so I published the game on itch.io and contacted my testers again to ask them to test the game.

But here’s the thing: some found it a shame to have to download the game. Since several testers made this remark, I thought it could be the moment to look at how online playable games are made and see if there was a simple way to adapt my game to this platform.

That’s when I discovered HaxeFlixel. It’s a framework whose purpose is to help develop cross-platform video games. It contains lots of classes and functions specially designed for video game development and I find it fantastic! The only catch is that this framework is based on the Haxe language and I don’t know this language at all.

Since it’s a cross-platform framework, I thought it could be interesting to try anyway, just to see. So I worked a bit on Haxe, read quite a lot of docs actually and spent a few additional weeks on game development.

And there you have it: the game is also playable directly in the browser. However, it is different from the game developed in C++/SFML. It seems a bit less performant and is less complete, I had spent less time polishing it for the pleasure of finishing it and seeing it run.

In the end I was thinking of adding the possibility for the player to create their own levels and add them to the game but I was about to start my preparatory years and I didn’t continue. If you think it’s worth adding this feature, don’t hesitate to contact me to talk about it!

PS: this feature was implemented in the C++ version but is incomplete, it’s not very accessible and is much less polished than the rest of the game.