DWINDLE

A game about getting smaller. You are in a child bedroom, building routes out of the toys lying around to reach places you cannot yet get to — and every route you take shrinks you further, so the room keeps growing around you.

The problem

The jam theme needed a scale mechanic that felt seamless rather than a cut to a bigger room. A hard swap breaks the illusion instantly; the player has to walk through the change and believe it.

What I built

• A physics interaction system for picking up, carrying and freely rotating objects, so players assemble their own staircases out of toys rather than follow a scripted path.
• A portal system that produces the shrinking effect continuously — you walk through and come out smaller, with no loading seam and no cut.
• All of the 3D assets, modelled from scratch in Blender inside the jam window.

Built solo during GMTK Game Jam 2024. The portal maths leaned on Brackeys’ Smooth PORTALS in Unity and Sebastian Lague’s Coding Adventure: Portals.

Play it

Downloadable on itch.io.