We make puzzle games.

Our first game was developed in a somewhat retarded way. Since the game development was our ‘second’ main occupation, we couldn’t do it full time. We tried working on the weekends using Skype but it wasn’t enough. We needed some continuous time sitting next to each other, to achieve our goals without shortcuts. That is why we came up with the idea of ‘development trips’ – every few months we would take a week off, pack a bag and go into the mountains. We would spend a week in the wilderness with our computers, and all we did there was game development and drinking the beer. We found a perfect, isolated space in Slovakia, just a few hours away from Krakow and we kept returning there several times offseason.

Kick the Brick turned out to be an isometric Sokoban. The tiled world was meant to limit the amount of work and still give us the fun factor in the making. We did not plan to make a puzzle game, but it just turned out that way. We quickly realized we were both really good at inventing puzzle mechanics and levels. In the puzzle world of Bricky we had doors, water and oil, sliders and cloning machines. There were many types of moving robots and armors against them. We even had dynamic a laser system 🙂 We just kept coming up with new ideas at crazy pace. In the end we created a complicated simulation system with dozens of interacting elements. On top of that, each level could be completed with or without finding the secrets. This was a lot of work!

We spent the ridiculous amount of time designing the game menu. Months polishing and changing it over and over. In the end, we came up with a circle-based menu and an animated character of Bricky wandering in the background. The design is funny and still appealing in a way… but it wasn’t worth the effort. An advice we would give to our younger selves would be: drop the menus entirely, or make it an addition to the game, not separate scenes. But in life, you usually learn the hard way 🙂