Gosh, time sure does fly when you’re making a game. I seem to have let June slip by without an update here. Although I have kept up with the video devlog series over on the YouTubes, I recognize that some folks just like to read a little more than they like to look at my beautiful face and unkempt mane.
I’ve been fixing up small things around the game that have been annoying me for a long time. There’s still bunches left undone on the “nice to have” list, but I’ve tidied up some important ones. Mostly I’ve been doing this because the progression on the artwork for the Mill area has been going a bit slower than anticipated (even though every time I do an area I anticipate it will take more time than the last!)
Part of the delay has been from doing some design revisions to the overall flow of the area. I mentioned these plans in the previous post, but I wasn’t expecting that the structural changes to the area would require so many puzzle design changes as well. It turns out that when you are planning on having an area be mostly knowledge-gated, you have to design puzzles that are specific to this purpose. Good knowledge-gates put up an initial barrier of complexity, but then fall rather quickly if the player has the pre-requisite knowledge.
Who’d have thunk that a good knowledge gate is one that gates mostly on knowledge!
In addition to this, I felt like there were a few small ideas in the area that could use a bit more polish in how they are delivered to the player. One of my favorite things in puzzle games is when I’m put in what seems like an impossible situation, based upon everything I’ve come to assume about the mechanics of the game. But the design or layout of the puzzle allows me to deduce that some move that was previously unknown to me must be possible. So, I have been doing some redesigns to create that type of experience. Requiring the player to guess that there is some emergent behavior of the mechanics that is non-obvious rather than giving them a simple situation which just illustrates it.
At this point, I’m fairly happy with the puzzle set for this area, and I think that the flow of ideas will work well. So I’ve spent the past week or so sketching out some rough ideas for the visuals. This has required me to do a lot of research on different types of machinery so that I can hopefully create something a bit plausible as a functional space.
Concepting is still a work in progress and things are subject to large changes, but here are some things that I’ve drawn along the way so far.
Taiji 