In Deuterium, players must assemble a fusion reactor on the surface of Europa by placing pipes from a very limited selection. Players must be careful though! Placing too many fuel pumps, or crossing fuel and exhaust pipes will result in disaster! Deuterium was built in 3 days for the Mini Jam 113 on itch.io.

While my portfolio doesn't show much of it, I love working with hex grids! So working on a 3D grid via a truncated icosahedron was a very welcome challenge. The most difficult engineering problem in Deuterium is identifying which tiles neighbor others and then evaluating if a pipe is a valid placement. Once you start examining the poles of the grid, the normal grid behavior breaks down. The problem gets even more complicated once you need to account for pentagons as well as hexagons.

I tried to expand Deuterium by expanding the grid. The next logical size is a shape where there exist 3 hexagons between each of the 12 pentagons instead of 1 as it is currently. However, that resulting shape is no longer an Archimedean solid and contains irregular polygons, which complicates the modeling of the pipes, since some hexagons will now be dimensionally different from others in the grid. I'm still looking for a shape that contains more regular polygons than what I currently have.