Shiropen Road, a ‘draw your own road’ 2D puzzle is now available as a free browser game

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-09-15 18:05 (JST)
Translated by. Ryuki Ishii

On September 11, game programmer baba_s released a 2D puzzle action game called Shiropen Road as a free browser game (Shiropen = white pen in English). This game was created during a game jam held by unityroom, a distribution site for games made with Unity.

baba_s’ announcement tweet has received a lot of attention with over 3,000 RTs and 5,900 likes at the time of writing this article. Many of the replies are from users enjoying the game and sharing their experience.

Shiropen Road is a 2D action game in which you advance through the stages to reach the goal. Character control is simple, with the A/D keys for left and right movement and the W key for jumping. Quite ordinally for a 2D platformer, but there is a twist; you can draw your own foothold on the stage. In order to reach the goal, players must use the mouse to draw white lines and use them effectively to get past the obstacles along the way.

The concept of “drawing lines on the stage” is nothing new, it has been done before. However, Shiropen Road stands out from the crowd with its well-crafted level design. The game takes advantage of the idea and expands upon it by providing various objectives. Each stage has three objectives: “reach the goal” “collect all coins” and “reach the goal by using only a limited length of lines.”

For example, in the first stage, there is a hole in the ground that covers a length of 50, and one of the objectives is to clear the stage by only using total line length of 40 or less. These are optional objectives, so you don’t necessarily need to complete them. As long as you clear the main objective, which is to simply reach the goal, you can proceed to the next stage.

However, the joy of figuring out the puzzles and clearing the optional objectives by exercising ingenuity is quite something. The solution to the puzzles for each stage is well thought out, making it fun to try to complete all the objectives.

baba_s, the developer of this game, is a lead programmer at Japanese game studio h.a.n.d. The company is known for developing games such as the recently released action RPG NEO: The World Ends with You. However, they did make a 2D action puzzle game called Gabbuchi back in 2019. Perhaps baba_s’ experience in developing a game in the same genre was put to good use for Shiropen Road. baba_s mentions Gabbuchi in their Twitter profile as well.

As mentioned above, Shiropen Road was created during unityroom’s one-week game jam. Astonishing feat considering how polished the game is, and how little time baba_s had to make it.

baba_s has contributed to the Unity game development scene in many ways in the past, by publishing a digital Unity guidebook for beginners, and sharing Unity related knowledge on their blog and Qiita (a knowledge sharing service for software engineers).

Shiropen Road is now available as a free browser game on unityroom.