This last week I finished the art pass on the area I mentioned in the last devlog post. I settled on “The Gardens” as the name for the area, as it features flower gardens near the entrance, a vegetable garden to the south, and an abandoned grape trellis to the east.

This marks the end of a month for which the game was unplayable, since I have to break a lot of things when revising areas. Normally these types of revisions don’t take a whole month, but the metapuzzle concept here (mentioned in the last update) was quite technically complex, and I ended up having to pare back some parts of the design due to playability problems.

I still don’t want to spoil how the metapuzzle functions, but essentially, it was possible for the player to get the puzzle into an un-solvable state. I tried to resolve this in a very lightweight way that would (in theory) add some additional depth to the puzzle. However, once I implemented it. I realized that my solution didn’t actually work, and so I had to choose a more aggressive fix that eliminated some of the additional depth I had hoped to have.

I am still hopeful that I will come up with a way to add that depth back in, but I felt I had spent enough time on the problem for now, and the metapuzzle is in “good enough” shape. Certainly an improvement on what was there before.

So I’ve finished up six of the eleven major areas in the game, and the next obvious step would be to begin artwork on one of the others. However, I’m a little reluctant to immediately break the game again, so I plan on switching gears to puzzle design for a bit. I still need to take a look at improving the panel puzzles for the Gardens, so I may do that this week in addition to some of the other puzzle design tasks on the list.

I’m mostly kidding about the title, but I’ve been putting the game out to some new testers these past few weeks (which is why I missed December’s devlog update).

Whenever I stop working on new things and take some time to reflect, I often get a bit depressed. I’ve mentioned this feeling during the previous round of testing and it’s similar feeling during this round. I feel accomplished in that I’ve made enough progress for the game to be worth evaluating again. But there’s still so much to do that it’s overwhelming to think about.

Looking at things at a high level, I’ve done a “good enough” art pass on five of the eleven areas in the game (although some of them I’d still like to make major tweaks to)

So that means I’m almost halfway done with the art, which is pretty good progress. But it also means that I still have the majority of the game to finish up.

It’s hard to make estimates on how “close to done” the design is because progress there is much less straightforward. With the art, it’s probably good enough to have art that looks decent and isn’t overly confusing. But with the design, there’s no “right” way for anything to be. It’s down to my personal decisions about what types of puzzles to focus on and how much should be required to progress in each area.

I also still haven’t put in anything resembling an ending, and I’m not even sure what that might entail. I think it’s rather hard to make satisfying endings to puzzle games. If the puzzles are too hard, it can wreck the pacing and just make the ending feel like a chore. Alternatively, if the ending is too easy, it can feel anticlimactic. Usually what works best is something that feels like a large change of pace from what came before.

To that end, I have a few ideas, but they are underdeveloped at the moment.

I’ll close out this post with a short clip of one of the areas that I’ve recently re-did the art for. It’s not entirely finished, but I’m happy with how it’s come along.