Nick Gravelyn

My DBP game Bloc is done! It’s not submitted yet, but it will be tomorrow.

Bloc is our take on the top-down shooter. What we did was take the basic principle and apply a coat of puzzle on top of it. The game works by moving the circle around and shooting the blocks floating around. To destroy a block, you must shoot it with an orb of the same color. Each color matches up with the face buttons on the controller. So you press Y to fire a yellow orb, B for red, X for blue, and A for green. Then you can use the triggers (or shoulder buttons) to rotate the circle.

This is where things get tricky. Because now the yellow isn’t facing up, but Y still fires the yellow orb. So your brain has to work to keep track of colors. We’ve found this mix of action and puzzle to be quite entertaining. So far we’ve heard primarily positive things from people who’ve tested it as well, so we must be doing something right.

We’ve also tooled Bloc in a way to be fun for all sorts of gamers and moods. We feature single player and co-op, three difficulties spanning from the casual to the hardest of hardcore, and we include a full interactive tutorial for learning the game. The game uses a local leaderboard for each difficulty based on game mode, so you can compete with friends and family for the high score.

In addition to being an entry in Dream Build Play, Bloc is also heading to Xbox LIVE Community Games right at the launch of that service (currently slated as Holiday 2008) from my new company Metacreature Games (website still in production).

Finally, here’s some gameplay footage of Bloc in action. Let me know what you think!