Amenti – 3
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Lately I have been working a lot on the Horus puzzle. I have playtested and tweeked the room and placement of the torches to make the puzzle a bit more interesting. And I also came up with an additional perspective puzzle which we will add to this room during the next week. The first concept and version of this puzzle lacked interesting choices the player had to make in order to light the torches in the room. The former version was basically just running around in a circle and light torches without any problem at all, the player did not have to stop and think about the next move or in which order to light them. Which is just a really boring puzzle room, or not even a puzzle in that case. Therefore this week I had to spend most hours playtesting and repositioning the torches to make it more challenging. So me and Gustav the lead designer sat down and discussed new ways to make it a bit more interesting. I came up with the idea that we should have some walls that follows along with the floor when elevated or lowered, and also put torches on these walls. In that way we could we could create situations where the player had to elevate the floor to the third level and light a torch/firepit which could not be lit at first or second level and then lower it down again to light other torches on other levels. We could also choose which walls that should follow along to make it so that certain torches can only be accessed on certain levels. In this way we force the player to visit all three levels in the room in order to complete the puzzle. With this small tweek of walls following along we could make the puzzle a lot more interesting.
In the former version of this room the player entered the room on the first level but I decided to redesign it so that the player enters the room on the third level while the floor is still on the first level. I made this choice since I want the player to get a good overview of the room right before starting the puzzle. The player can see where torches are placed and think of a way to figure out the puzzle and plan out the best way of solving it. In the image on the top left you can see that there is a platform on the third level of the room. This one is added for the perspetive puzzle that we will create next week. The idea is that the player need to stand on the platform and lower down the floor to the first level, so we put to levers on this platform aswell. And there is a chain hanging down from the ceiling with a very small doorarch hanging from the end of the chain looking like a piece of jewelry. But when positioned right on the platform and looking down towards the other door arch on the first level (you can see it on the image at the bottom), together they will form a door and the player will be able to access a torch in the first level that otherwise cant be accessed. It may sound a bit difficult but is actually quite easy! The more difficult part is to get the player to understand that they need to stand on a specific position in order to trigger this event. But we leave that to next week! Thursday this week we had playtest with the rest of our class and all the first year students. People who playtested actually enjoyed the game, more then I though they would. Since there is still a lot of feedback missing to tell the player what is going on. And feedback for our puzzles is a essential part in order to complete them, especially the perspective puzzles. But they liked the graphics even though 80% is just placeholders, which was a bit funny. Otherwise the playtest went as we axpected it to, there were a lot of confusion on the tutorial perspective puzzle and by lacking a animation when the player has fire makes it difficult to know when you actually have fire to light torches. So thats what we will do next week. That’s it for this time!
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