Shuffle Company

2021

I worked on Shuffle Company in various forms on and off for six years. Shuffle Company was intended to be the ultimate 3D puzzle-action game, with a focus on an easy and powerful level editor to enable an ecosystem of user created levels. It was an expansion on the designs of classics like Chip's Challenge and Return to Wonderland. Originally, I attempted to build it in a custom C++ engine, but that proved to be too ambitious and unnecessary, with only an early level editor being made. Then there were several prototypes for it made in Unity, most of which focused on solving problems around creating nice looking, 3D environments on a grid. This proved challenging, and I engineered several approaches to 3D tilesets of this sort, all with different tradeoffs.

Ultimately, the work culminated in a large, 20 level proof of concept demo. This demo proved the design ideas could work and provide for many interesting possibilities. Since this project had taken so long, still needed a lot of work, and was highly niche, I decided for my own sanity to take an indefinite pause on it. I might someday return to it again as a passion project.

The source code for the Shuffle Company prototype can be found on GitHub here: Shuffle Company Source Code Repository