Category Archives: behind the scenes

Breakdown behind the scenes – Part 3 – Puzzles

SPOILERS ALERT! If you’ve not played Breakdown yet go do so before reading these posts as they contain, amongst other things, a full walkthrough!

Now that I had a rough story I got a pad of paper and sat down for an hour or two working out all the puzzles and effectively writing a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire game. I’d say this is an almost essential step because it shows you exactly what you need to get done, and lets you see how far you are into the game’s development.

Neat handwriting is purely optional. This walkthrough also isn’t as detailed as it could be, the reason being that because the game is so short most of the design is in my head so this only has to act as a reminder of all the components and their order.

Puzzles are difficult things to come up with. The basic method I use to create them is to focus on the overall objective and come up with a series of tasks the player must complete, or obstacles they must overcome in order to get there. In Breakdown the objective is given in the MAGS rules – the ship cannot move and the player must repair something.

Ok, so lets say the player has to repair the ship’s engine. What could be wrong with the engine? Well, what things do you have to do to maintain a car engine? How about the radiator needs filling with water.

*Water + Engine = Repaired Engine.

That’s a little simple. Ok, where do we get the water from and how does the player transport the water to the engine?

*(Container) + Tap = Water in (Container)
*Water in (Container) + Engine = Repaired Engine

Where can we hide a tap? Well, how about in plain sight? Let’s put it right in front of the player in the first room they can interact with, the sleeping quarters, where it also makes logical sense. By the time they’ve discovered they need water, they’ll probably have forgotten all about it!

What about the bowl? Well, we could leave it lying around, but that would need somewhere logical for it to be like a kitchen or dining room. I can’t think of anything else I want to do with either of these rooms, so how about a food vending machine like they have on Red Dwarf? I can put that in any old corridor and it’ll add some character to life on the ship by making the player interact with background objects. What’s more If I can think up a use for another item of food I can make the player use the vending machine more than once so it seems less of a gimmick. How do I stop them ordering all the food at once though? By making the food cost money, and giving the player different amounts of money at different points in the game so that they can’t buy the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Suddenly something as simple as topping up the water level in an engine’s radiator has become

*Money + Vending Machine = Bowl of Soup
*Bowl of Soup + Tap = Bowl of Water
*Bowl of Water + Engine = Repaired Engine

Add to that a need to top up the oil level and the fact that you can’t even get to the engine in the first place, and you start to get an adventure game.

Some puzzles are born of necessity to make something more difficult, others are put in because they add character or make a good joke. I already mentioned the joke about the ship’s captain being bald (like Picard) and having his head polished. Suddenly I’ve got an opportunity for two puzzles – one in which the aim is to get the can of polish, and the other in which the solution involves a can of polish!

To be continued…

Breakdown behind the scenes – Part 2 – Characters and story

SPOILERS ALERT! If you’ve not played Breakdown yet go do so before reading these posts as they contain, amongst other things, a full walkthrough!

Continued from part 1…


Ethel (nameless at the time) was the first character I drew. Top tip – aliens are really easy to draw because you don’t have to worry about proportions. As I drew him I started coming up with a bit of backstory to add to his character, like him having a rubbish grade in some science subject that made him the most qualified crew member (and therefore rather full of himself). I also decided I wanted humans on the ship as well as aliens (and a human as the main character would be easier to relate to). Humans and aliens working together on a space ship? That’s a bit like Star Trek… Add a Star Trek-like shirt, badge and joke about lack of trousers and the game’s premise started to fall in place…


Norman was the next character. Another alien because they’re easier to draw and its easier to motivate yourself to draw hard things (like people) when you’ve already got other things done on the project. Different shirt colour because he’s a different type of officer, though I hadn’t decided what yet. I used contrasting ideas in his design, heavy-set and muscular, but very short, which lifts him from just being another background character. Meanwhile I started thinking about the Star Trek red-shirt – the extras who’s only purpose is to die instead of the main characters. What if the main character was a red shirt, sent in to do the dirty work because the other characters couldn’t be bothered?

(Another idea, which I would have loved to put in but got cut because I didn’t have the time, was that the ship would be filled with dangerous items. Doing certain things – trying to pick up sparking wires for example – would kill the player. However instead of the game ending like Sierra games used to, you’d get a new character – who looked identical to the original – taking over the quest and inheriting all the items you’d picked up. Kill yourself in enough different ways and you’d unlock a secret ending.)


A ship is nothing without its captain, so that was the next character I drew. Like every good parody captain he would appear to be strong and heroic, but never do any work (and he’d probably flee from the first sign of danger). Sticking with the Star Trek parody I made him bald and came up with a joke about him having his head polished by a subordinate. I liked this idea and raised it in the design from a background joke to a part of the game. Now all I had to do was come up with a good use for a can of polish…

To be continued…

Breakdown behind the scenes – Part 1 – Idea

SPOILERS ALERT! If you’ve not played Breakdown yet go do so before reading these posts as they contain, amongst other things, a full walkthrough!

“The theme of this month’s contest is a classic sci-fi setting – you must have your main character(s) on a ship afloat in space that is, for whatever reason, unable to move (other systems may be malfunctioning at the creator’s discretion). Are the characters scavenging the ship? Or is their own ship out of commission? The cause of the malfunction is up to the creator.”

It’d been a while since I’d entered a MAGS competition and, as is often the case when you already have a project on the go, I was feeling inspired to do something different. When SpacePirateCaine’s very open ruleset came along I decided to think up some possible games I could make to it.

My first plan was to do some kind of horror game, big on atmosphere. I’d love to do something serious that really grips the player, but ultimately decided I couldn’t pull it off in the time. Next idea was to return to my game-making roots and do something in an RPG Maker style – top down tiled graphics with a focus on exploring and environmental rather than inventory puzzles. Again another idea I’d love to return to in the furture, but some quick attempts at drawing tiles went badly and it would have been cheating to have used someone else’s free tileset.

I have a general rule of 5 days planning for MAGS. If I’m going to make a game in such a short amount of time I’ll need to know (more or less) what I have to draw, script, test and so on. So on the 5th of April (a Sunday) I had a last ditch attempt at coming up with a game idea and opened up Graphics Gale and started pixeling characters…

To be continued…