Spinlock

When I published my manifesto for Manifesto Jam I mentioned that I'd be releasing some unfinished prototypes I started and was just keeping around for no good reason. This is another unfinished prototype that I think had a fun idea at its core I wanted to put out there.

This started as an entry to Falling Blocks Jam 2025. A couple of things inspired this. If I don't have a good idea for a game jam, one of the classic things to do is take an existing idea and break one of the rules. In Tetris blocks fall from above, so what if they fell from multiple directions? I also liked the idea of shuffling a big, hulking blob of squares around and navigating its movement and positioning.

Then I had the question of what you're actually trying to do. You can't make lines any more like in Tetris, but I had this idea that you were building clumps that you could sink into target goals. Once you touch a sink with the right colour, all connected blocks of that colour disappear and you get points based on the number.

There are two ways it can go wrong. If you miss catching a falling block, it hits the far side of the screen and becomes a blocking stone that you can't move past. Also, if sinking tiles disconnects part of your mass of tiles, that disconnected segment becomes a huge mass of stone. This is cool because it becomes a huge obstacle, but I think in practice it may have been too punishing if I'd expanded the idea?

I didn't have time to finish it for the jam (I was coding one-handed, and I was using it to learn love2d) but I'm happy to put it to bed. I liked the idea a lot, but I have other stuff I want to work on. Most of the idea is contained within the gifs, but if you want to play the game you can download the love file (NOTE: you will need to install love2d to run it).

Controls:

WASD: Move the 'core' of your blocks around.

Space: Cause the next block in the queue to immediately fall.

The next block is always marked with a trail showing where it will fall, and has a timer showing how long left before it falls naturally.