Crate Crew

Overview

Crate Crew is a Sokoban-style puzzle game with a twist. Instead of one worker, you control a whole crew. Each worker is a different colour and can only push crates that match their colour.

This makes every puzzle about teamwork. You’ll need to swap characters, plan ahead, and avoid blocking yourself in. There are about 60 levels, and it gets pretty tricky later on.

Development Story

This one started as a small Sokoban demo. I liked the idea, so I expanded it into a full game with lots of levels.

The first thing I coded was the crate-pushing mechanic. Once that worked, I added multiple characters and the colour rules. From there, it was all about building puzzles that made use of those rules.

I used an algorithm to generate rough levels, but most of them weren’t much fun. So I ended up hand-editing almost everything. Then I playtested, tweaked, and playtested some more, before finally arranging them into a sensible order.

Design Notes

I wanted the game to look like a warehouse, so I leaned into industrial tiles. The BeepMini palette is bold, but I used darker shades for details to keep it interesting.

Balancing the difficulty was all playtesting. Some levels came out too easy, others impossible. I tweaked them until they felt varied and fair.

Technical Notes

Crate Crew uses a bunch of BeepMini features:

• Automatic wall and floor tiles for easy map building.
• Animated actors for animated characters.
• Generated music and sound effects for that retro feel.
• A custom passcode system I added to BeepMini, so you can skip to later levels without saving.

That passcode system was a neat shortcut. Small feature, but it made the game much more player-friendly and adds to the old-skool retro feel.

Reflection

Making Crate Crew taught me a lot about Sokoban design. I hadn’t built Sokoban levels before, and it’s surprisingly tough to get the balance right. I don’t know if hardcore fans will find it hard enough, but I still enjoy playing through the levels so I hope others will enjoy it too.

I’d quite like to return to it at some point. Adding things like bigger scrolling maps, keys, doors, and obstacles, could make for an interesting sequel.