Thanks! It does have mobile controls, only visible if your device has a touchscreen.

Thanks! The faster diagonals is an interesting one: the way I programmed it involved applying forces multiple times in nested conditionals (largely stemming from GDevelop’s very unfortunate lack of support for an “else” condition), so the otherwise simple math would have involved complicating or rewriting the code so much that I just decided to leave it. Seeing the end result, I’m ok with that now.

Thanks! I did consider putting music in (and actually composed a basic music track before scrapping it because it was a rendition of public domain music I decided I didn’t want the baggage of), but ultimately decided that music would get in the way of the Atari style, given that most Atari 2600 games didn’t have music. And besides, there wasn’t anything interesting I was going to do with music, so it felt rather superfluous. I guess hypothetically if I revisit the question in the future then the music could exist to speed up as the workload increases to its maximum, but I feel like in an optimal play, you already get that auditory response from starting to hear the “crack” sound effect more and more often.

Thanks for the comment! For an abstract arcade game like this, I don’t think a more concrete story would be appropriate, but it does have a subtle story. The story is of an invisibly disabled worker who is pushed so far beyond what can reasonably be expected of them that they inevitably fail. Hammers are an abstract representation of workload, and the tiles in the game are an abstract representation of the worker’s ability to do the work (i.e. spoons in spoon theory). The conclusion of the story is, of course, the worker getting fired, and then getting blamed for it by their employer.

I could of course spell this out in the game, but I feel it works better as an abstract story.

Thanks for the comment! I don’t think your suggestion would be in-line with the game I set out to make, however. Bombs dropping along with hammers would give the impression that your boss is deliberately malicious, when what I’m actually intending to portray is a boss who’s so indifferent to their employees’ welbeeing and/or so ableist that they overestimate the abilities of workers, push them to work harder than they really can, and then blame the worker when they fail to live up to the unattainable standard set for them.

Thus, this game is designed in such a way that if it was the case that you could rush indefinitely, you would be able to not only work indefinitely, but do so rather easily; the workload never increases to a point that this would even be difficult if that assumption held true. Deliberately, the only reason it doesn’t hold true is because rushing breaks the tiles you’re walking on, and because you can’t even move at walking speed in a location where there are no tiles left.

Basically, in Tile Crunch, you’re playing as an invisibly disabled worker whose disability isn’t being taken seriously. Able-bodied workers, by contrast, would control the same, except their tiles would never crack. In other words, tiles in this game represent the same thing as spoons in spoon theory.

I’m real happy that I was able to pull this off. My girlfriend has been playing this too and has even gotten competitive on the high score list! I’ll be real curious in the coming years to see just how much money it’s possible to get. 🙂

Thanks, I’m glad you liked it! 😄

Thanks! It can sometimes be hard to explain the struggle of burnout, and I’m really happy that I’ve managed to convey some of that in this little game. 🙂

I’m glad you liked it! And yup, learning to cope with that downward spiral to delay the inevitable as long as possible was exactly the game design I was going for. 🙂 I didn’t consider a tapping method myself, so maybe I should experiment with something like that!

Haha, yes, that does lead to a faster gameplay loop, at the cost of more tile crunching. Glad you liked the game!

Thanks, I’m glad you liked it! 🙂

Thanks! I’m glad to hear it had an impact. 😄