Maru Maru

Maru Maru is a puzzle game made in Unity. It had the goal of being a personal project to learn the basics of mobile development / publishing.
The goal of this game is to wake up all the sleeping robots, however the challenge is that any robot that is woken up will either wake up their sleeping neighbours or put to sleep their awake ones. 

Each level has a new puzzle to work through, and while some levels may look similar, they have very different ways of solving them.
Initially, the game was going to be 9 levels long, but after some playtesting, I was told that while people enjoyed the concept, the players who found the game too easy from the start were disappointed that there were no more levels.

​The thing I found hardest about making this game, was balancing. This was because there were two very clear types of players. 
Firstly, there were players who would breeze through all the levels within a few short minutes, as they seemed to understand the concept easily. The second type of player, however, was someone who did not understand the rules of the game and as such would struggle on the first level and would press anything until they completed a level, missing the lesson in many of the levels. 

To combat this I attempted to write a simple tutorial for players. However, it seems that players would often skip this tutorial, or simply do not understand its contents. In hindsight, I believe something that didn’t help the second type of player, is that on each click of a robot you would get a sound effect as feedback which I think is why players were confused about whether they were getting closer to the goal of each level.

If I were to redo this game now I would likely attempt to implement some form of a hint system to aid players. As I did in my later puzzle game CatKnight.