And so it has come to an end. The 10 weeks me and Oskar had to create a prototype of a game has come and gone. But we did manage to create something, a game that was much more feature-complete than we initially thought possible. We really crammed the last stuff in before calling it done, though the plan was to release on sunday a couple bugs and issues delayed it until today.
I’ve been incredibly happy with the result, especially considering being able to create a fully working ingame editor. And it’s not over yet, I will continue working with this game because I believe there is a solid puzzle game hiding underneath. I just need to dig it all out and polish it up. The game is still pretty rough as it is, you’ll probably encounter bugs and some parts might be a bit confusing.
For the future development I have a few tough design decisions ahead of me. From testing I’ve heard multiple times that the way the boss knocks over boxes is a bit confusing. It might just be a missing visual cue, something we’ve already fixed for this release but we’ll see if it’s just as simple as that.
Another point has been the pathing of the boss. A big point of the game understanding and predicting how the boss moves so that he walks into the traps you place so if the player doesn’t get why he moves a certain way then it will be an exercise in frustration. I’m going to write a bit more about how I’ve currently created the boss AI while also going into the current issues and possible changes.
Rock the box!
It’s interesting when creating a puzzle game since any changes to how the mechanics of the game work can completely break puzzles. The smallest change in boss movement may make a puzzle impossible to solve, compared to other games where they might just become harder. Some may call this frustrating but I do find it interesting since it gives the designer so much power.
Until next time, enjoy the prototype and if you have any questions, suggestions or ideas, feel free to give me a tweet or an email (links are in the page footer).