I'm happy to announce that "Pull" is finally available to play for everyone.

Pull is a short game focused on the ability of throwing and pulling a ball. You only get one ball and you need to complete the entire game using it. If you haven't played it yet, I recommend you do so now!

This post is going to be about how Pull came to be.

(dramatic voice) The time is one year ago. 

I had the idea for Pull rolling around in my head for a few weeks. I became really interested in the simple mechanic of throwing and magically pulling a single ball. I wanted to explore all possible consequences that might create in gameplay. In what ways can I separate the player and the ball to make interesting puzzles? What is the limit of this mechanic? Is it enough to make a small game?

At the time I was working on Noderunner, my previous project, whose development has been going for over a year. I started making that game when the pandemic hit and I was in between jobs - I made quick progress and it felt wonderful. Then it didn't, then it did again. You know how those things go. Anyway, after some time I got a full-time job and so Noderunner's development had slowed to a crawl. I decided that if this thing is ever gonna see the light of day, I need to cut scope, scale it back, etcetera. Working on it became unpleasant and so my mind wondered about a different hobby project. And that's then the idea for Pull came to me.

The beginnings

Partly because I was fed up with Unity, partly because I wanted to learn something new, I decided to play around with this new idea in a game engine unbeknownst to me. As we say in Poland, to combine the Pleasant with the Useful.  And so I picked Game Maker Studio 2.
Surprisingly, I had a working prototype of Pull after a weekend. The character movement, jump height, ball throw and pull mechanics, speed, all of that was locked in at after just 3 days. I thought DAMN progress is going fast, this thing is going to be ready in no time! That moment was around May 2021. I experimented with different mechanics up until October. I tried multi ball, enemies that need to be hit with a ball, disabling gravity on the ball, the ball teleporting to the player, but all those were hit and miss. They made the game too different, dragged the gameplay away from the fun core that I decided needs to stay. Plus, some of those felt like if they stayed, I'd need to remake the entire existing level structure to accommodate them - and what they brought to the table wasn't worth the effort. One success from those mechanical experiments, were the that some respawning enemy bats inspired me to recreate the basic destructible block in the game, into one that reappears after a few seconds. From that, the green and orange variants were a natural conclusion: blocks that are always there, but disappear when hit. Blocks that are never there, unless you press a button to spawn them for a moment. And finally, blocks that are there, but if you press a button they disappear for a moment. It all felt fitting and elegant.

The story side

The narrative was the hardest thing for me to do in Pull. I knew what I wanted the game to be about, but I had no idea how to implement it without killing myself with a scope increase. Very briefly I thought about cutscenes or branching dialogue, but I held myself back to keep it simple. I spent a few weeks trying out a ball recolour mechanic, to give players choices and give them an ending where each one has a different looking ball with markings, but there was so many design, code and narrative problems with that I decided to scrap it. I knew that I wanted there to be different characters throughout the game that will that the player can talk to. I wanted the player to project themselves onto the protagonist, to make the legend theirs, so the protagonist's observations and thoughts were carefully crafted. Time will show if I succeeded. The ending was a challenge, ever since I began thinking about the storyline I knew it had to be a game without an ending that people normally expect, and that might frustrate some of them. I'm eager to see what people think.

Wrapping things up

I had a game on my hands, things were slowly coming together, through testing and whatnot. I learned that I totally hate marketing and anything revolving around it. I think I lasted 5 or 6 days of everyday posts on twitter before I gave up. I'd rather spend time polishing the game. The teaser video I made in that time was ok, but I decided it was not good enough and I need to make a proper trailer. I'm not gonna go into politics, so I'll just say that at that time the world got slightly worse and I just haven't found it in me to sit down and do it. I thought "that trailer is not gonna happen and it's the only thing holding the release back". So here I am, two months later, with a release of a game that was almost ready in 3 days and then took a year to complete. I learned a lot about which parts of the game developing process I enjoy, and I will be using that knowledge when planning my next hobby game. Maybe it's gonna be Netrunner, maybe something fresh. I still have no idea whether I want to post progress on the prototype of my games or only drop it when they're finished. But that question will be answered in another time!

Hey you! If you managed to read all the way here, thanks! Why don't you leave a comment, hit me up on twitter or something. Don't be a stranger!

- Doku