Pushing Your Buttons

The Hook

Pushing Your Buttons is a single-player puzzle game, where the goal is to press a series of red and blue buttons to unlock a series of doors to reach the purple button at the end of the level. While the game's mechanics are very simple and elegant, I have been able to use them in complex ways to create interesting puzzles in the level design. I have taken some inspiration from the Portal games, which have similar puzzles involving placing cubes on detectors to unlock other objects.

Visuals

Artistically, my midterm is inspired by the colors blue and red, and what the two colors can represent.  I used blue and red to color-code the game's interactable objects. I gave the player 3D glasses, because they are blue and red. I also made the game's goal be purple, because blue and red make purple.

Design Challenges

One of the main things that changed over the course of the project for me is the way that I used the pushable boxes. Originally, I was planning on having the boxes serve two functions:

1. The boxes would be used in Pokémon-like strength puzzles, where the player must correctly push the boxes out of the way to make it through a room
2. The boxes would be used to be pushed onto buttons to make the buttons stay down

In the end, I decided to only use the boxes in the second way, because I wanted to make the game feel more elegant, and using the boxes in too many ways might have overcomplicated things.

One design challenge I had while working on this project was what the player should do if a box gets stuck against a wall. Sometimes, a box would get pushed against a wall in a position where the player could not pull it away. I turned this problem into a level design idea, where I found ways to slide stuck boxes away from the walls, without adding a mechanic to pull them. This is noticeable in Level 3 and Level 4.

Credits

This game was made by myself in March 2021 using Unity 2019.4.18f1.

The game's background music is by Kevin MacLeod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xrlfhq1j3g&list=PL70EJyu1faZhl3LDl2OoXatYjWWnM8VgW&index=29

Other sound effects are from Freesound.org