The Great One's Feast

Falling blocks game about feeding a monster

It's here: The Great One's Feast on Itch

It is a game where blocks fall, made for... the Falling Block Jam 2026 edition
It's not timed or reflex based like Tetris or Dr Mario, and it requires the player to deliberately go over the top line of the play area. I think it holds up on its own as a game in this genre, and looks good enough for what i could do on my own.
It's free to play so you can check it out on its Itch page. I'm generally very proud of it!

Below are some notes for future self if i ever revisit this project.

Kemist base

I reused some base code from my unfinished project called "Kemist" (if you want to play it, only its very old prototype version is up online and kind of playable at the moment) - the whole "blocks fall, elements are grouped by kind" part that i have written at least four times now is something i could have wasted 2-3 days of the jam to write again for no good reason other than to start from a blank slate. Rather than that, i decided to just delete majority of Kemist code and assets to base Feast on that. Finding an excuse to reuse your own code is always a great motivation to write it in a reusable shape in the first place - i'm so glad it wasn't too bad of a base for a new project!

Scope cuts

Initially i thought i'd give a choice of two random perks on level up, but decided to go with a list of boons tied to specific levels. Mostly because main gameplay has enough randomness to make or break a run - having unlucky choices of upgrades on top of that would have been too much. Fortunately, Kemist had game modes implemented, so it's still possible to go back to this idea and make it an optional mode if i revisit Feast after the jam ends.

Another thing is the selection of groups during the feeding phase. In Kemist, they resolved bottom-up and left-right based on the bottom-left-most element in a group. But in Kemist, removing groups from the board was something that happened on drop, so there were rarely more than 2-3 groups to resolve. Here i had an idea that feeding phase would be similar to Same Game - the beast only "clicks" big enough groups, starting from the largest one. After i sorted groups by size for that purpose, it lost the original order from Kemist (which was never sorted if i remember correctly, it was just a consequence of how group matching code iterates over the board). It still kind of looks like it favors Kemist's order, but it's not guaranteed by anything! I left it random after playtesting for a while and decided not to change the sorting rules. I think it is fair enough and requires a bit of thinking ahead to make groups of different sizes to make the beast's moves predictable. This is also why i kept scoring simple (number of elements removed multiplied by number of elements unlocked) to make players focus on trying to influence beast's choices rather than filling the board with massive groups.

Graphics, sounds and overall presentation are kept simple. Not as a deliberate choice, i just can't do better at this time (though i could make my own food graphics, but i grew fond of twemoji look after playing with it so much over the last week). Sorry if it's too much of an eyesore for you! I welcome honest feedback, but can't promise any post-jam changes :c

Accessibility (or lack of it)

There's no button remapping or gamepad support at this point. Settings screen is very clunky and unintuitive. Both controls and settings are the bare minimum that i implemented for Kemist and it pretty much stayed this way.

Text is not very readable. I tried some different fonts, but since i'm using Love2D's default print/printf functions some fonts did not work well or at all! The best you can do for now is to change Eyesore Mode (shader selection) in settings to Disabled. On the other hand if you're a masochist, feel free to switch it to one of two other non-default options.

If i had to list my priorities for improvements post-jam, it'd be:

More readable text / font choices (personally i love when games have a setting for that!)
Button remapping + gamepad controls
Better settings screen, for real
Only after that, any gameplay or graphics improvements

Final note

I put more unlockable recipes in it than i was ever able to see in play - had to cheat during playtests to see if the game doesn't crash after getting the last one. On the released version i only ever got to pie, so i've no idea if it's even possible to see any of the five meals above it. The one just after the pie is very likely to be the only one doable on a lucky/skillful run.