You all remember the time, when COVID lockdowns hit. Well, fast-forward to April Fool’s Day. I had a virtual beer with Krystof (our game designer and 3D artist). During our chat, we had an idea to make a super quick hyper-casual game.

So after a few minutes of brainstorming, we came up with Blocky Dodge (well, we came up with that name later).

Blocky Dodge is a minimalistic hyper-casual game, in which you have to dodge blocks of enemies going at you in a random pattern, but also collect coins to gain points. That’s it. We posted screenshots from the development on our internal Discord, so I’m going to pick up some highlights:

8:30 PM

We agreed on having a 3x3 grid. The gameplay should be simple: swipe into your desired direction, but:

You cannot move more than one block per swipe
You cannot move diagonally

Instantiated 3x3 grid

9:00 PM

Krystof has sketched the target visuals we want to achieve. Just colored blocks, with some simple shading and gradients.

Sketched visuals

12:05 PM

Movement done, basic visuals done.

Movement GIF

1:40 AM

Applied some polish, and done.

Final gameplay GIF

The next day we spent another hour creating the Google Play store page and published it. This game actually started the dark ages of us making hyper-casual prototypes with mobile publishers—I think I’m still not fully healed from that.