Troll the Gnomes

A stage-based, systemic, deductive puzzle game with handcrafted puzzles.

Control the trolls to defeat the evil gnomes.

This project is still a work in progress, but the core mechanics and most of the polishing are complete.

Technical highlights

Tight, sequence-based controls

• Custom motion system for chaining animations and gameplay events with zero garbage allocation
• Data-driven game logic, decoupled from Unity’s physics and colliders (e.g. validate level structure, not runtime collisions)
• Fluid animation chaining: fully tile-based logic that feels continuous and non-grid-bound
• Undo with rewind mechanics, integrated into core gameplay rather than bolted on

Built-in level editor (player-facing & production-used)

• The same editor used to build the shipped levels is available to players.
• Custom compact binary format for levels
• Custom windowing system built in uGUI
• Full quality-of-life feature set: undo/redo, clipboard operations, selection tools

Pixel art & rendering

• Pixel art created in Aseprite
• Python and Lua scripts for mass export and global palette replacement
• Advanced pixel alignment techniques, like pixel perfectness even at odd resolutions and intentional “cheating” during motion to preserve visual crispness