Ziggys Nutty Quest was developed in a game jam where we had 48 hours to develop a game. The theme was calculating so I worked in a team of 5 to come up with something awesome! From the start, I wanted to work on something to do in space that was unique and a really fun way to calculate things.
We agreed upon gravity assist and we got planning! We tried many different ideas, toying around with allowing the player to tweak the mass of the planets which would affect their gravitational pull but it turned out that it was too hard when giving the player so many variables to play with. We ended up restricting the player to only changing the velocity of the squirrel as well as the aim, however this meant that every challenge we presented to the player was possible to win with the tools they hand in hand! So we had to manually adjust each planets gravitational pull and playtest a ton to make sure they were winnable.
If we couldn't win a level, we didn't put it in.
