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Unfired
A hard puzzle game of impossible art, in clay.
- Status
- In development
- Platforms
- iPhone, Mac, Web
- Started
- 2026
- Built with
- Godot, GDScript, Python, Blender
Why I made it
I wanted levels that are very difficult, or at least not obvious: the kind that break your brain at first. They should be hard by thinking, never by dexterity, timing or attrition, so rewind undoes anything.
The references are Monument Valley for the single impossible diorama and the calm pace, and Machinarium for a handmade world and a wordless story. Any illusion or mechanic can join; every level combines them, and its catch lies where they meet.
What it does
- Drag the sun around the courtyard’s rim, and each carving reads as raised, sunk or flat depending on where the light falls. The figure rides the carvings that rise.
- Raw clay can’t stand in direct sun, so the shadows of towers become the roads.
- Kilns fire the figure a piece at a time, and each piece changes what it can do. With its feet fired it wades; with one arm it pushes jars and with both, statues; with its body fired the sun can’t hurt it.
- A floor of tumbling blocks reads as cubes or hollow boxes, depending on which side the sun last came from.
- Painted doors are real doors while the light on them is the light they were painted in.
- Joins in the picture: the figure walks across edges that only meet from where the camera stands.
- No timer: tap to walk, and rewind any move.
Screenshots
Under the hood
- A pure rules core with its own solver checks every level for a solution and for dead ends. It agreed with the earlier Python study solver on all 39 courtyards it was compared on.
- Solutions are measured in decisions, and levels are refined by automated search: one went from 5 decisions to 12. That measures search rather than insight, which only first-time players can test, and none have yet.
- The first chapter has six levels so far. Still to come: glaze, the mirror beams, the potter’s wheel, final audio, the hint bird and the Roman forms the chapter is meant to be built from.
- Web and Mac builds run. The iPhone build exports and links but has not yet run on a device or simulator.