Exciting News!

Caleb

2026-09-13

Hello!

It’s been so long since I’ve done one of these I was tempted to just drop it. However, I’ve felt a surge of motivation and decided I wanted to keep going with this. I’ve been hard at work on my games and am excited to share some great news! BlankSpiral Studios is about to release our very first game! Simple Squares is a worker-placement platformer with both single-player time trials and multiplayer hijinks. Look at the game entry in the top right to learn more.

Now, on to the updates!

Game Updates:

I have created a completely new game since the last blog entry. Simple Squares is coming soon, with more features planned for the immediate future. Check back here for more details in the coming weeks.

I’ve still been working on Go Once More, continuing to improve the gameplay loop and getting art commissioned. As of now, I figure about 85% of the art assets have been gathered and what’s coming up is a lot of non-technical work. Once again, continue to check back for more info. I’m keeping this one brief to focus on Simple Squares before its launch.

Design Discussion:

Let’s talk about Simple Squares. It was born out of a different idea for a multiplayer puzzle platformer. I tried several different ways to create puzzles that players would have to figure out with friends based on colors and abilities tied to those colors and I kept running into a problem.

It just wasn’t fun.

I could create a convoluted path of actions someone would have to take to succeed a level, but the line between interesting and tedious is very defined in my mind and I was firmly planted on the side of tedium.

So I scrapped it. I continued work on Go Once More, creating better tools for me to test with and putting the idea of a puzzle platformer on the backburner. But sometimes it’s moving away from a problem that brings you closer to a solution.

At the end of the day, the problem I was having was that I wanted players to make decisions. I want them to have to think, not just see the path they are supposed to take and just try it until they succeed. How do you reward players in a platformer? A timer is the de facto. But how do you add decisions to a platformer? And that is what I was working on.

The idea of putting puzzles with multiple solutions crossed my mind. I’ve always loved the idea of having something you did in the first 10 seconds having a direct impact on the third minute. So, how about having timers for different areas? The logic continued to chain to timers that the player directly affects and on to where objects the player chooses directly affects the timers. And with that, the idea of a worker-placement platformer was born, where decision-making on how to place workers meets mechanical skill of platforming. After a few initial tests seeing how hooked my friends already were on the idea, I realized I had a winner.

I continued to iterate on the idea, creating new block types, power-ups, and other resources to be used to get the best time and realized how fun it would be to challenge friends to it. I thought of a leaderboard but that felt so impersonal. After all, how were you supposed to gloat when your friends were trying the level after you? So I whipped up a few multiplayer modes where you could see everyone racing in real time as well as ways to cooperate with your friends, determining the best ways to use your resources together and have been having such a blast with the ideas in the meantime. With a bit more polish, I figured it was ready to release, with a few more ideas in the pipeline for post-launch.

I’m very excited to show you all what I’ve been working on!

Thoughts of the Week:

Perfection is the enemy of good.

That is the line I’ve been thinking of since the start of this project. Sometimes it’s more important to get things done than to perfect every little detail before moving to the next thing. If you find you are unable to move on from a specific detail, sometimes it’s better to move on to everything else and come back to that detail to see if it even mattered in the end. Oftentimes, it’s not.

Beyond that, sometimes it’s better to drop things that just aren’t working. If I continued to bash my head against the wall that was a puzzle platformer, I would have driven myself crazy. But taking a step away and coming back to analyze what wasn’t working fresh eyes allowed me to create something new and fresh while learning from the past.

I would recommend taking a moment to breathe sometimes.

Closing:

Not much left to say! Keep an eye out in the next week or two for Simple Squares on Steam! And keep up with this blog to see new features I am thinking of adding!