Download QC4 – NanoColor Protocol from itch.io
The Corporation all above, where they like to be. That is one of the underlying story bits that I put into this game’s backstory. As this game is a puzzle game, I wanted something extra to look out for, while you’re in the boots of David, a corporate worker, who is enlisted for a new job, where nano energy is created via rotating and matching up quarter circles to full circles on a nano grid. This energy is so miniscule for the work of just one guy, so imagine how many people is needed to even light up a small light bulb. Human work is so cheap, they work for candy. Literally.
Daviiiiid…. we need you…
I made this game for the HEJ challenge of April 2025, for the chosen themes of “Image 2” and “Image 3” (yes, the themes were literally pictures of stylized shapes). By the way, I am well behind with these postmortem devlogs and with gameplay videos for my projects, as it’s already December the 28th. Life and work just get in the way all the time, but as a pre-new yearly resolution, I will start to get back to making them. It could be, that I won’t be able to make too much HEJ challenges in 2026, as I want to move forward with something bigger. But first I still have to iron out some technical problems I faced this year in GameMaker. One being 3D in GM the other is a new, working camera system with smooth camera scroll AND without it being basically destroyed by some kind of stream overlay (not being able to go to full screen), and also finding a solution as of why my GM games become un-focused on every 3rd-4th start, and sometimes even during playing.
My memories are a bit foggy as of what was the exact idea for this game jam, but I remember I almost included another theme: “Build the level you play”. The original idea was something similar: still nano experiments, but the player should have build a sort of continuous groove for nanoballs to roll in to certain endpoints. Every little piece could have been modified in some way by “zooming in” – basically some other mini puzzle, or rather a fidgeter, a cozy experience to repair, or reshape existing pieces. But in the end, I made the idea more in line with what I can do in the remaining time and so QC4 was born. This project also had its problems: I wanted to use 120 FPS for smoother falling of the pieces (I did that in S’lots of Gems and it worked there). I also used glow effect. I shouldn’t had to. It turned out, that this two combined, made some error that slowed the game down to 60 FPS on top of the resource devouring glow handling of GM. So, in the end I rewrote some key parts to run the thing on 60 FPS and removed the glow.
So the idea is a puzzle game, a mixture of match 3 and of rotating puzzles to form a specific shape. I added the nano bomb idea, to clear more elements, and the anchored quarter circles, that cannot be rotated, but can be used or exploded, or alternatively moved left or right with the side arrows. The idea needed a backstory to run parallel with the simple game, as I felt that the decreasing energy – the danger of failure – and the earned candies to reroll the level are not enough to keep it interesting. So came the idea of David, the protagonist getting into a new job, an experiment of sort in a corporate workplace, where clearly human rights are disregarded. I added a robotic voice (using my dialogues and voice changed with VoiceMod) to guide the player and acting as a tutorial. I also added an other character, who also helps with tips and ideas. You can play through the whole thing in an hour and you can see the nearly endless rows of workers, who work on this experiment.
There are always some setbacks in every project I made so far, but nothing pops into my mind besides the aforementioned problems above. I made the game, made tutorials for it, then a bit later I added some quality of life improvements. All in all, this is an interesting bit of a puzzle game, but nothing big or super special. The story became just creepy and mysterious enough so players probably are interested what happens in the end, where your choices seem to be meaningless in a corporate world.
PixelKrajcár 