Blockin Color

Context

A jigsaw where a silhouette board sits at the top of the screen with coloured dots telling you which piece belongs where, and a basket of chunky three-dimensional pieces sits below it.

Thirty-plus shapes generated from one painted texture, build held at 47 MB

Content pipeline

Modelling thirty-plus puzzle shapes by hand was not affordable. Instead the designer drew a single square figure out of cubes, sixteen by sixteen or thirty-two by thirty-two, and painted a texture over it.

My tool read that texture pixel by pixel, decided which squares were live, and joined them into puzzle pieces.

Content became a picture rather than a model, which is why a game with that many distinct shapes still ships in forty-seven megabytes.

The hard part was never the shapes — it was how a piece feels in the hand

Touch

The difficult part was never the shape generation. It was touch.

A piece has to feel right while it is being dragged, snap onto the board when it is close enough to the right place, and behave sensibly while sitting in a crowded basket with dozens of other pieces.

That last one bit back: a pile of physical bodies in a tight container is unstable, and pieces would occasionally launch themselves out of the basket.

Worth calling out

I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.

The pipeline

• The tool that turns a painted grid into playable puzzle pieces, so new shapes cost a texture rather than a model.

The handling

• Drag feel, snapping onto the board, and the behaviour of a crowded basket of pieces.

More from the game

Project facts

Year

2024

Role

Unity Developer

Team

Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me

Scope

Solo developer, concept to release

Studio

Vira Games

Engine

Unity, C#

Platform

Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore

Target device

Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM

Shape pipeline

A painted 16×16 or 32×32 grid becomes playable pieces in the editor

Snapping

Half a world unit of tolerance onto the board

Build size

47 MB — an outcome of the texture pipeline, not a target set in advance

Where to see it

Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Blockin Color - Brain Puzzle

Tools & techniques