Caldera

Caldera is a puzzle game in which the goal is to defeat enemies by moving tiles around. One crucial pillar of game design was to ensure that each level could be solved with multiple solutions Into The Breach was the primary inspiration.

Tap adjacent tiles to move on a grid, moving tiles in your row or column the chosen direction, similar to 2048. The catch was that there were enemies, and to defeat them, the player had to push them off of the edge of the grid.

The first part of the process was designing enemies. We had one enemy that moved one space toward the player each turn (using the A* pathfinding algorithm) and attacked one space in front of it, and we immediately knew that we could take that one step further by creating an enemy that shot a beam to each tile in front of it rather than just one. The next step involved creating the terrain, starting with movable sandy land and then progressing to non-movable mountainous land. We also introduced chasms, which acted like the ocean at the grid edges but were located within the land. The levels are intended to showcase each enemy and land type individually, gradually integrating new mechanics with previously introduced ones. We thoroughly tested each level to ensure validity and multiple potential solutions.