When we talk about Blocks That Matter, some of you listen carefully what we have to say about gameplay and stuff like that, and sometimes someone stops us and says : “Ok, but will Blocks That Matter have a story?”. When it happens, I remember this sentence every game designer says once in his lifetime: “Nobody cares about stories! It makes no sense in a videogame!” and I smile inside.

Of course, some of you care about stories, and we love stories too.
Here is the story of Blocks That Matter and its little hero:

Short version
(for people that will not read dialogs and skip intro cinematics)

> A tiny driller robot travels underground in order to save its creators kidnapped by someone who wants to steal their work.

A potential game title was "Indie Game Devs in trouble"

Long Version
(for people that can focus on texts more than 1 second)

> Sweden, land of indie games : Alexei and Markus are two talented indie games developers who both created successful indie games. Few months ago, they announced their desire to work together on a new project, a project that would totally mix their universes. A lot of videogame players around the world were excited by this announcement…but not everybody.

One day that Alexei and Markus were working together at Markus’ place, two strange men entered the house and threatened them with guns. They kidnapped the two developers and imprison them in a cabin located in a forest of pines, far from the city, with their computers : “From now on, you will work for our boss! Finish your game before the end of the day or we’ll kill you”. It seems like their “boss” doesn’t read a lot of indie games website cause he would have known that the project of Alexei and Markus is not a videogame, but a tiny robot driller that is still in Markus’ house right now.

The only thing Alexei and Markus can do is to activate the robot from their cabin and guide it to their prison in order to save them.

– – – – –

Now, let’s see who the main characters of Blocks That Matter are:

TETROBOT (codename)
TETROBOT is a tiny driller robot, as little and white as a sugar cube.
It can drill, collect, recycle blocks of matter into new pieces and destroy lines. Pretty useful if you like gardening.
Tetrobot is a codename, its real name is ??????

Alexei
Alexei is probably the most famous indie game developers of all time, a superstar, but he’s also an adorable person. He started creating videogames when it was still student in Russia. One of his puzzle games was so succesful that he once won an IGF award.

Markus
Markus is slightly younger than Alexei, but he has great skills to program games. Last year, he created a game that made him a rich guy. Of course he could have spent this money to buy a private jet and go shopping to London every week-end, but he prefered to spent his money to create new projects and Tetrobot is one of them.

Underground creatures
They don’t really want to hurt our little hero, but if it touches one of them it explodes. It means robots and slimes can’t kiss each other, and it is quite sad.

The mysterious bad guy
Who is this guy and why does he want to stole the work of Alexei and Markus ? The only thing we know about him right now is that his voice sounds really strange.

Oh, by the way, needless to say that all the not in-game art is provided by the incredible Géraud Soulié!