PSP 2022 Game Jam

Oct 28, 2022

I can't resist a good homebrew game jam. The challenge of building a game for an old platform from my childhood is always fun, so when I saw an announcement that some people were organizing a PSP game jam, I jumped right in and made Noodle Box!.

Originally, I wanted to create a 3D strategy game, but due to time constraints I had to ditch that idea completely. Instead, I came up with a weird mashup of Snake and Tetris. I'm obviously biased, but I think it's actually pretty fun once you wrap your head around it! It's far from being a complete game, but it is playable.

At first, I just made a simple tetris game with a snake character that you can control, but then I thought that was boring. It's just tetris with extra steps. Then I added the ability to spawn blocks by eating yourself, and that was more interesting, but still pretty dull since it's still just tetris with extra steps (but slightly easier since you can make the blocks you need)

...but then I noticed that trying to make perfect shapes to fill in the gaps was pretty satisfying. So after some brainstorming, I came up with the idea of a snake (worm?) that works in a warehouse and needs to create packing peanuts to prepare items for shipping. Instead of classic tetris gameplay, there are complicated shapes that you need to completely cover in packing material. Any uncovered surface will break off during shipping, reducing package weight. Protected surfaces weigh 1kg, and you need to try and pack exactly 50kg for a perfect score.

If you don't have a PSP, you can play it in an emulator!

Download

The game is available for download on itch.io

Gameplay Video

© Alejandro Ramallo 2024