Since you’re reading this on the development blog, you’re probably already aware; but I freshened up the home page to be cleaner and more informative for newcomers. There’s also some nice links at the bottom to all of the places you can find Taiji around the internet.
Speaking of which, you can now join the Discord group and chat with other folks who are excited about the game. We’ve got room to grow, so I hope you’ll consider joining our little community!
If you have any suggestions or complaints about the website or the discord group, then you can leave a comment on this post or talk to me on Discord and I’ll see what I can do!
Working on The Endgame
Taiji’s ending involves some puzzle concepts that I don’t want to spoil, so this article will be spoiler-free as far as Taiji is concerned. However, I will need to discuss some other game’s endings for context. Spoiler sections will be marked if you want to skip them, you may be able to pick up enough with context.
Because I want to keep the ending a surprise, I haven’t been able to work on it on my livestreams. But bouncing between working on art for the livestreams and working on the endgame prevented me from being able to do the type of Deep Work necessary to get the ending right.
However, as I’m heading into what should be the final year of development, it is urgent that I have this part of the game design worked out, so I’ve been taking a bit of a sabbatical from livestreams so that I can focus on getting the ball rolling here. This past week has involved dusting off some code that I haven’t touched in almost six months.
What Makes a Good Ending?
Making a satisfying ending for any video game is a challenge, but I think I puzzle games are a particular enigma. With action games it can often suffice to cap things off with a particularly difficult boss battle. But what is the equivalent of a boss battle for a puzzle video game?
The most straightforward interpretation might be to simply have a really hard puzzle to cap things off, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role that boss battles serve. Boss battles are not simply “the normal gameplay, but harder.” Instead they offer a different type of gameplay than the rest of the game. The boss enemy will usually have complex movement patterns that require memorization, and may change over the course of the fight, or perhaps the environment will become involved in the battle in a way that it previously hadn’t.
The important takeaway is that satisfying endings require a change-of-pace. There ideally needs to be a shift in the gameplay style, context, and intensity. How you choose to accomplish this is really up to you, but the point is that although a hard puzzle may suffice for the ending to a smaller subsection of your puzzle game, it cannot be relied upon on its own to create a satisfying final coda.
So, let’s take a look at some of the methods that other games have chosen in order to achieve this change of pace. One of the most common methods that I’ve seen is to introduce a timer of some kind.
(mechanical spoilers for the end of Portal and Portal 2 follow)
Both Portal games, for instance, end with boss battles where the player must solve a series of portalling challenges in a limited amount of time. Apart from a bit of a forced mechanical trick at the end of Portal 2, both games don’t introduce any new mechanics at the end and instead have the player exercising basic puzzle skills that they have mastered earlier in the game, with most of the challenge coming from the time constraint.
(end Portal spoilers)
The problem with puzzle games having time-constrained challenges is that they can devolve into a sort of worst-case scenario if you’re not very careful about designing them. If the puzzles are too much of a challenge or the time limit is too aggressive, players may find themselves repeating one of the least replay-able forms of gameplay besides horror.
(I mean, I’m a huge fan of puzzle games, but it’s an obvious fact that you often get much more out of replaying action games due to the dynamics of the gameplay than you get out of replaying a fixed set of puzzles, even in a fantastically well-designed puzzle game.)
(mechanical spoilers for The Witness follow)
One possible way of resolving this problem of repeatability is to introduce dynamics into the puzzle gameplay. The Witness does this with procedurally generated puzzles both in a small subsection of the Mountain ending, and in large form in its hidden Challenge area. Although the player must repeat the Challenge many times in order to succeed, because the puzzles are different each time, the player is never doing the exact same set of gameplay events through their many attempts.
(As a side note, if we consider The Challenge to be one of the endings, The Witness actually has three different endings: The meta-puzzle gauntlet inside the mountain, the time-limited challenge, and the sky lounge ending. Perhaps The Witness is “covering all the bases”, having multiple endings which might satisfy different players in different ways.)
(end The Witness spoilers)
There are lots of different approaches that have been attempted with puzzle game endings, and I won’t rule out incorporating some aspects of what other games have done into the ending for Taiji, but it is my plan right now to attempt something that I have not seen done before.
With that said, it is a large design and tech challenge and it is still in the nascent stages as of the writing of this article. But if I can pull it off, I think I will have created something that I personally can be satisfied with.
Oh, there’s also a another ending. š
Taiji 