And if I’m designing a puzzle I think, “Well, what do I need for this puzzle?” I need a light bulb, I need a pulley - whatever, and then I would try and design stranger puzzles with stranger parts.īut let’s say I’ve got a puzzle that involves a parade of circus elephants that has to be visually exciting and strange to look at, but then if I haven’t thought about how that scene makes sense in the story I’ve got a big problem. And I think that is charming in the short run, but that as you get further into a story and you see more and more disconnected images, you begin to suspect that there’s nothing holding it all together. What drove you to that initial design process if you changed in the middle of things?Įarly on, when I made the demo, people responded to the sort of, like, dreamlike, surreal imagery, and so, in a way, that was like being rewarded for putting a lot of strange disconnected images in a game. People too often get attached to something because parts of it are great or because of the time they put into it, and it stays in, and it’s a mistake. I don’t regret having to throw out content I wish the process didn’t take so long, but cutting something, even if you put a ton of time into it, is often the right move. I’ve always felt that - coming from a background in software engineering - if you’re writing code, one of the best feelings you can have is to cut a big chunk of code out because you’ve redesigned so that it’s not necessary. So at some point, I said, “this whole structure of the chapter was wrongheaded,” even though I’d dumped a ton of time into it and maybe even finished the art. You know, a story has to have a certain shape, you can’t just keep gluing extra scenes onto it. That formulation, I think, is the big thing that took me a long time.Įarly on, I would build a bunch of puzzles without thinking through what it all meant narratively, and I had all these moments and scenes that didn’t work in the story. So they’re in conflict and that has to be carefully balanced and resolved for each moment in the game. But more puzzles with more pieces forces more scenes into the story or forces me to try and cram more objects into one scene, and that means the needs of the story and the needs of the puzzle design push against each other. You don’t ever want to have two scenes that serve the same purpose.īut when I’m trying to design a puzzle, I want as many puzzles as I can get, and I want each puzzle to have as many pieces as it possibly can as the game goes on. And when you’re telling a story, there’s a principle of a narrative economy where you want to use as few scenes to tell a story as you possibly can. The pieces of the puzzle are parts of scenes within the world, and so first I’d come up with a puzzle design, and then I’d have to figure out how to kind of organically justify or integrate the parts of the puzzle into the story. Maybe I could have sat down and planned parts of the game better, or maybe I needed to build stuff that doesn’t work in order to see that it doesn’t work. Buried Signal You cut out entire chunks of the game? They didn’t make sense within the story, so the stories began to feel like a bunch of disconnected imagery, and that’s not satisfying for a player as they get deeper into the game.Īll four tiles are puzzles on their own, and the whole thing is a puzzle as well. I had a bunch of puzzles made, and the puzzles were kind of cool, but the scenes making up the puzzle didn’t make any sense within the world of the game. And that’s why over the course of the game I built big chunks of content and then whole chapters that I ended up throwing out because the balance was off. Game design is more like a confusing headache for a long time until everything kind of clicks together, and then it feels good.īut trying to design a puzzle game where every piece of each puzzle is also a scene in a story - it took me a long time to figure out how to balance all the constraints. I like doing art, and sometimes visual design is challenging, but it’s fun. The most difficult parts were the art and the game design. The design, technologically in terms of coding, is not all that complicated. What would you say was the most difficult aspect of doing all of that yourself? I have a sound designer and a composer, but I did all the game design and all the art. My understanding is that you’re the sole designer on the game?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |