Free Puzzle Game Development Environment

This week has been a busy one for me, finishing up final projects for my last year of college. One of the biggest time investments has been for my class called “Motion Planning” (algorithms for robot guidance) for which I did a particularly interesting project: a development suite for playing and designing shortest path puzzles.

The program is called “Delivergrid” (I know, it’s an awful name) and they’ll be a link at the end of this post to download the zip file that includes the executable, an instruction manual, some example levels, a powerpoint presentation and an unpublished journal article.

Basically the game takes place on a grid (like most of my games) and you are presented with open space, walls, goals and a variety of other squares (like jumps and teleporters). Your job is to number the goals so that visiting all of them takes the least amount of time. You may also have inventory items that you can use to create faster routes. You can also design your own levels and save them for others to play.

Making the program was very cool, but designing levels is the part that is the most fun. Keeping that in mind, I’ve also included a folder of puzzles I’ve designed so far, but I encourage those who are interested to experiment with their own designs and send any good ones (in the default .map format) back to me to play.

Download Delivergrid