PENS DOWN
"Pens Down!" is a 2D Puzzle game where the player has to get 100% on a test they didn't study for or else you're expelled! Use your magical Watch to stop time temporarily and find the answers to the test.
Primary Role: Game Designer
Secondary Role: Project Manager
Team Size: 5
Time frame: 4 Days (GMTK Jam)
Engine: C#, Unity
Theme: Countdown
DESIGN CHALLENGE- TIMESTOP
Time-stop abilities are notoriously hard to design around — give the player unlimited time to think and you've essentially removed the challenge. I needed time-stop to feel powerful without letting players "solve" every puzzle for free.
Rather than treating time-stop as an optional tool, I flipped it into a required one. The core gameplay presents players with choices that are sometimes deliberately wrong or misleading — information that can't be trusted at face value. Time-stop becomes the mechanism players need to use to find the correct answer, rather than a shortcut around the challenge. This turned a potential "cheat button" into the central puzzle-solving verb of the game.
To balance this, I mapped out variables like how long Timestop would last, and a Timer for the test itself in a spreadsheet to make sure the mechanic remained as a Eureka moment to get the player out of a tense scenario temporarily, rather than becoming trivial once players learned the trick.
The result was a mechanic that felt earned rather than exploitative — players had to actively use time-stop to parse the "correct" path, which made it feel core to the game's identity rather than a bolted-on power.
Timestop Gameplay to find the correct Exam answer
POST-MORTEM
For this jam I tried a new format of exercise with my Team to find a game idea in a fast manner so that we can get a head start. However, the idea of "Pens Down!" was not only the idea we didn't originally land on. But we ended up being stuck for about 2 hours. I think when it came to branching out ideas, I was too accepting of multiples paths and needed to be a bit more strict so that the idea could be found faster.
The project ended up with alot of Dialogue as well. To me this a result of poor level design in which we had to explain directly explain to our player what our core mechanics are. To combat this, next time I wish to prioritize fully fleshing out our Core Gameplay and drawing out how it can be introduced to the player.
And lastly, I received alot of Design questions from my team, but the ones that stood out to me was the lack of clarity for our game's level size, and camera. I ended up too focused on mapping out Start to Finish gameplay that I forgot to clarify the basic foundation as level size and camera, as this could also affect how big our character is in game, and how our character moves.