Postmortem

Postmortem

At the beginning of the project, Connor and I decided to make a puzzle-platform game. In addition, the two principles we have made are: the first is not to make enemies, and the second is to make sure that players do not feel the difficulty of the game with controlling a character. This gave us a huge challenge because each stage has to give the player a completely different experience. We can’t not simply increase the number of enemies or make them stronger.

When I first designed the level, I didn't draw the entire map at once. I have summarized the actions that can be done through the mechanics I created. Then I combined several actions that I sketched to make one level. It was very easy to design the level when I summarized the different kinds of possible actions.

What I learned

Through this project I felt that the puzzle level design was difficult. When I was designing a puzzle, I was worried that the puzzle would be too easy. However, during the playtest, I found out I was wrong. Most players found it harder to solve the puzzle than I thought. In the early stages, I created a steep difficulty curve without giving the stage a chance to get used to the puzzle. Of course, the most important thing is playtesting, but I felt that I needed to give more tutorials and players a chance to learn the game.

This time, I learned that 2d characters can also be animated by inserting bones like 3d characters. This is probably the best solution for non-pixel 2d characters.

While working on this project, I learned the fact that I like puzzles and that I like to see players trying to solve them. I found that players are more focused than ever when solving puzzles. Puzzle game design was the genre that I had to pay attention to most in terms of game design. For example, even if the location of one box is slightly different, the difficulty of the game can change, and I had to consider the player's expected play path very much when designing the level. I learned that the game design has a large portion in puzzle game.

Success

The successful part of this project is the mechanics part, and its technical part.

Climbing cliffs and making them grab the ledge is one of the most successful parts of this game.  As it was able to hold onto the cliff, it expanded the range of level design. I didn't have to make higher jumps to improve the character's jumping ability. The higher jump would have shown the overall too arcade feelings and too unrealistic gravity of this game. Since the player had to launch the box and push it down, the overall object needed a sense of weight, and hanging on the ledge solved this.

The challenging part when I made a push and pull mechanic was making the box move physically when I push it so that the box actually can fall down when it reaches the end of the platform. To do that, moving the box as a child of the character didn't help, because it would move the same as the character moves. As a solution to this, I made only the box's x-axis velocity equal to the character's x.velocity, and only the box's y.velocity has its own velocity. This method allowed the box to move naturally within the game.

Failure & Next Step

The most received feedback from the game was about the difficulty curve, and I fully agree with this. The first and second stages were relatively simple and there wasn't much knowledge to learn. The first and second stages were relatively simple and there wasn't much knowledge to learn. However, from the third, elements that have never appeared before appeared and these put too much pressure on the player. Therefore, for the next step, the task of learning the players by distributing the stages to multiple stages remains with me.

Another failure is in level design. In my game, if the player makes a mistake, the game can no longer be played until they press “esc” key and restart the game. I knew this during level design, but it was very difficult to take care of this and make a puzzle of difficult difficulty. It will take a lot of time for players to restart the game because they don't know if they make a mistake and the game will no longer proceed.