Back in August 2024, I sat down and brainstormed a series of sketches in the style of mock-up game screenshots, in an effort to produce more pixel art and low-poly works. This series previously resulted in my PS1-inspired piece "The Gentleman's Showdown". So in December 2024, I decided to pluck another sketch from the pile and build upon it.

In 1989, Konami released a new arcade puzzle twist on the familiar space-shooter genre. Quarth, also known internationally as… Block Hole, is a game in which Earth faces a world-ending bombardment of irregular block shapes. It is up to you to destroy these weird shapes by transforming them into neat four-sided rectangles.

It's easier to show than to describe, so here's some gameplay!

The core Quarth gameplay is fairly straight-forward: You shoot blocks to turn shapes into rectangles, you have a special projectile that will temporarily slow the field, and power-ups are activated as soon as you destroy them. You can also boost your ship, should you grow impatient wating for new blocks to approach and squish you flat.

I was a wee single-digit-aged child when I was introduced to Quarth in the early 90's. Specifically, its Game Boy iteration, which brought a few changes compared to arcade: each stage now had a quota to clear in order to advance to the next stage, and power-ups could now be held and activated at will.

My planned approach was "straight-forward" on paper. I wanted a version of Quarth that married features of the Game Boy title with its arcade progenitor, designed for the SNES. I also wanted to add some Puyo Puyo-esque flair into the mix, and so the ships would receive pilots that react to the gameplay.

In the end, I chose to develop a self-playing demo in Unity.

A larger write-up with a complete set of behind-the-scenes material will grace this site eventually. It was a large project, and there is a lot of ground to cover. 💦