Stacker was originally one of six prototypes drawn up, and one of only three to be implemented into Construct 2 in some form. It is a 2-dimensional puzzle game, where you take various rectangular and square shapes and stack them accordingly. One the player has stacked the shapes to a certain height, the player then gets to advance to the next stage. It was made with only three stages, and should the player complete all three they one. On the other hand, if they use all of their ‘resets’ they would get the ‘game over’ screen and have to start over from the first stage.

           

     Some observations that were made during early build were in relation to the title and victory screens. While originally unintentional, the blocks used also had physics applied. Thus, you could click, drag, and throw around the blocks. It served as a tutorial of sorts to familiarize players with the gameplay before starting. Likewise, the end screen dropped in several dozen blocks, allowing the player the satisfaction of stacking- or knocking over- blocks at their leisure. Other observations noted that one could simply toss the blocks across the screen, hitting the affixed height requirement without technically ‘stacking’ the blocks.

               

 This was one of two major issues that I came across during the second half of the build. It was difficult to find the right combination of events that would allow the blocks to drop in, but also allow the blocks to be stacked the way they were meant to. Inverting statements for “on release of mouse-click” or “on click held” both yielded the same result; with the latter activating if the player dragged the shape up to the height goal. The second issue was that during play testing the game was stuck in a feedback loop between the title screen and victory screen. While stuck, it was unable to play through any layout or stage other than the title and victory screen. In the end, it turned out that one of the conditions was interfering with allowing the layouts to play. Once disabled and other conditions changed around, the game was finally playable.

              
  In the future, I would like to make more games that take advantage of the physics behavior or multiple sprites and objects. I think it could offer a variety of outcomes, and there is something inherently satisfying about moving and sending things flying. I would also like to make more stages for stacker, possibly implementing more shapes in order to increase difficulty. Figuring out which events will allow the condition of building to a certain height without giving the player options to ‘cheat’ would also be a great achievement.