Encaixotado is a puzzle game with a single level made for the 3rd year of the Cofounding Calendar, a free online event that is like a month-long game jam, where small puzzle games made by the community are shared everyday of December.

In order to take part in this event, all games had to follow the following rules:

• Be a puzzle game, although we could use a broad interpretation of the term.
• Have only one screen and only one level.
• Use the GOTHIC BIT color palette**,** plus a color of choice.

In this document I describe the design process behind Encaixotado. Mainly the process behind the conception of the idea and the level design, focusing on what was most relevant and interesting in these processes. Therefore, the content of this document will be better used if you have already played Encaixotado. If you decide to play it after reading, be warned that the document will spoil some of the game's cool surprises, SPOILER ALERT.

Pre-Production

Pre-production is the initial phase in the development of any game. This is a phase of conception, research, planning, prototyping and goal-setting, basically everything that makes the project ready to be produced without a lot of re-planning. In this session I'm going to describe the three most important moments in Encaixotado's pre-production: immersion, defining the design goal and how I came up with the idea for the game's main mechanics.

Immersion

Immersion is what I call the moment in pre-production when the team (or designer in this case) immerses itself in everything that could contribute to the design, such as themes, stories, mechanics and other games similar to the project. The point of the immersion process is for the designer to get new references and insights that will contribute to the project's design.

Since I had already decided to make a sokoban puzzle game (a box-pushing game), my immersion process mainly consisted of playing the games created for the two previous editions of the event. My goal was to understand how other designers approached this challenge and how they managed to create great puzzles within those restrictions.

This process showed me some trends in my favorite entries:

• They had new and deep mechanics.
• They were focused on fully exploring their core idea and delivering an experience full of small revelations.
• They featured a single level but with multiple puzzles.
• The early challenges were designed to make the player discover how the mechanics worked.
• Overall, they were fair and rewarding experiences.

Defining the design goal

Equipped with the knowledge gained in the immersion phase, my next step was to define the goals of the design. Most of the goals were defined based on the design trends of my favorite games from previous editions of the event:

• Create mechanics that are interesting.

  Focus on finding a mechanic that has interesting dynamics to be explored in the puzzles, even if it’s not particularly deep.