Week 9, Last sprint and GGC

Hello everyone!

The last sprint before GGC, aswell as GGC itself is now over!
It has been a blast to work on this project and i´ve learned a lot, especially about Unreal Engine 4.  It had its ups and downs, nothing is perfect.
However the project itself has inspired me to learn basic code so that i can prototype games.
To communicate ideas is an important part of the work, and with a prototype, that is one additional way of communication. I also wish to improve my ability to write design documents. However it is hard to improve with limited feedback and the fact that every person will interpret something differently to another.

While we are on the subject of interpretation, i would like to discuss the work that the group has been doing the last week and the feedback from both the Beta test and the people at GGC. The last weeks work has been focused on polishing the environment and gameplay. As it is a puzzle game, quite a bit of attention has been put on the puzzles themselves. However there is a problem with creating puzzles that we only realized in hindsight.
We as creators of the puzzles find them easy to solve as we know the solution.
We might even consider them easy as you only need to press one button to solve it, but the results was vastly different.
Some players figured out the puzzles on a minimal amount of time while some spend a considerbly amount of time playing the game trying to solve the puzzles.
As creators we consider the puzzles rushed and simplistic but that did not stop players from enjoying the game or taking their time to solve the puzzles.

IF there is anything to learn from this, it is that puzzles are hard to design as it´s not just pure numbers that you are able to tweak. For the next time im creating a puzzle, more playtesting and with focus groups could prove to be valuble as the target audiance for the game are the people that are suppose to enjoy the game. The fact that someone that dislikes puzzle games can not solve the puzzles or spend a long time on them can be disregarded as they are not the people that will be buying your game, they most likely only tried it as it was free.

See you on the next project!

//Oskar

About Oskar Kervefors

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