I'm happy with how this one turned out. I haven't done puzzle games in the last few Pyweeks and I wanted to do one. The theme was tricky and it took me a while to get some puzzle mechanics that I was happy with. I wanted to embed the "dark matter" theme into the mechanics and the idea of moving through physical objects and pulling them came early. I really like how simple and mechanically connected to the theme they are, so I felt it was important to keep them.

Originally I considered an idea where you would have two worlds and you could only interact with the world that you're not in, but that turned out to be not only too complicated and but also too hard to express visually. My rule of thumb for Pyweek is to keep it simple, so I took a step back and discarded that. The tricky part was that phasing through blocks and pulling them by themselves were just "character skills" and didn't offer any challenge, so I needed to figure out what was the antagonist of the puzzle. The notion of a creature that phases through physical objects led me to consider some sort stealth mechanic, which was simplified into The Eye which detects you after two moves. The fact that this can be viewed as a metaphor for the search for dark matter is a happy coincidence. :) The destructible blocks as a resource came later, which take inspiration from falling platforms in other block puzzle games. When designing puzzle mechanics I always aim to maximize the depth-to-complexity ratio and I think this has a pretty good one.

Once I had those settled, everything went smoothly, since the mechanics are relatively simple to implement (though I was able to reserve a good amount of time this Pyweek and could afford a bit of extra polish). Designing puzzles was also a lot of fun. The game does get difficult towards the last few levels, which intentionally build around some unintuitive moves. There is a walkthrough in the game description if you're stuck, but there's no ending so the fun is to simply solve the puzzles. :).

I'm also happy how the graphics turned out, even if there's still some room for polish. Drawing and animating the octopus-spider-alien was quite fun. I like how it looks like it's dancing when it's pulling an object. :)

I'm glad that many people enjoyed it. Congratulations to the team winners and to everyone who finished a game this Pyweek! See you next time.