About
Cutoff is a puzzle game made in 48 hours for the 2021 Global Game Jam by a team of 3.
After an additional 3 months of development it was licensed to Cool Math Games.
I owned our game design, puzzle design, and art.
Media
Process
I'm a big sucker for jam themes. They're usually what I draw inspiration from during a jam, but the story for Cutoff goes a bit different. Instead of the theme, I was actually inspired by the animated reveal video!
I've timestamped it in the video above, but there's a brief, 5-second animation of a flashlight that inspired Cutoff.
Next step, ideating!
My first concept for Cutoff after watching the reveal video.
Being able to drop and pick up the flashlight was cut almost immediately, since it didn't bring anything interesting to the table. To make it worthwhile, it would've required even more systems layered on top of it.
We ended up having to axe the "goal in the shadows" mechanic too, since Unity's 2D lighting did not want to play nice.
Our dilemma.
So we pivoted!
My concept for our new "thing that has to be lit" mechanic.
Screenshot of our first prototype.
Introducing the "thing that has to be lit" mechanic! Not only was it way easier to program than the previous system, it also made for better puzzles. And once we added a "thing that has to be in the dark," we really hit our stride.
Eventually, levels completed once all the "things" were lit, no goal required.
Screenshot of the finished jam build.
After the jam was over, my team was contacted by a recruiter from Cool Math Games who was interested in hosting Cutoff on their legendary site, coolmathgames.com. Elementary school me was losing his mind.
There were two stipulations for the license.
The first was adding more levels! The original jam build only had 5, so I went about designing a dozen more. Here's a comparison for 3 of those level concepts with their current, in-game iteration.
Concept for level 5.
Level 5 in-game.
Concept for level 8.
Level 8 in-game.
Concept for level 9.
Level 9 in-game.
The other stipulation was implementing a level select screen.
My first concept for the level select was way too esoteric from a UX perspective, but on the opposite end of the spectrum was our programmer's suggestion.
Way too artsy.
Not artsy enough.
I knew there had to be a middle ground between the two, so after we put our heads together, me and my teammate arrived at Roman numerals!
We had a level select that was both readable and minimalist.
Level select in the published build.
You can play Cutoff on coolmathgames.com.
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