Dev Diary #23 - Never blow away your dreams
Hello fellow Earth-dwellers,
We swim against the current to achieve our goals, but sometimes you just got to go with the flow ~
This scene reveals a mechanic that will play a crucial part in the 2nd half of the game. the player would be required to navigate through the map by hovering over certain points, in some cases it requires you to dodge it completely, or even create a hover see-saw situation to get past. This particular level contains series of puzzles containing this hover mechanic and is easily the most tedious design of this project - this level alone probably had already undergone 6 - 7 different iterations and variations.
Many of the design decisions were related to improving situations for player's understanding of the puzzle; the set-up, the goal, and the eureka moments. For example; having the seaweed swaying along to the changing current may sound simple/ obvious - but in our case, it only came to mind after test-players got really confused when the seaweeds weren't swaying along to the current, which in turn cause the changes in current to be significantly less noticeable, which in turn, causes player frustration. I won't claim this as a cerebral puzzle but we're definitely learning a lot from developing this and are improving it as we go to make it a more compelling experience!
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Cheers, stay safe & have a great weekend ahead!
- El
Comments
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Wow great insights! It sounds very exciting! Don't forget to keep all the discarded things for later use - aka maybe an artbook that will feature all concepts and things that have made it into the game or didn't make it eventually.
That's the challenge! XD We try our best to keep track of all our unused assets & drafts, but there's literally a ton - probably only about 30-40% goes into the final game after the process of iterations and revisions :) But we'll keep the best ones for the artbook for sure!
Yay!