Images
Details
- A PICO-8 puzzle game. Takes the basic mechanics of a twitch skill game like Snake or Tron, and puts them into a puzzle context.
- Solo project, all art and audio was hand made to match a dark, almost fairytale-esque story.
- To facilitate planning, the game is turn based, with no auto move.
- Trails stay indefinitely. This prevents backtracking, and gives more weight to each move.
- Teleporters and levers were added to give more variety in level design.
Post Mortem
Good
- Players really liked the puzzles, felt challenged but not overwhelmed.
- I got a lot of value out of just a few elements. The entire game worked with movement, collectables, teleporters and switch blocks.
- UI was inspired by the way old NES games tend to just have a small header of text/black tiles overtop the scene, as a result it turned out nice and unobtrusive.
- Persistent trails mean that players must be careful with every move.
- Teleporters and levers were added to give more variety and challenge to level design.
Bad
- Goal of collecting all gems was a fun goal, but it lacked granularity, leading to the frustration when restarting on the last gem.
- Implementation of game states + transitions was sloppy.
- Dropped plans to include an overworld, in which the player would leave a fixed length trail (allowing them to see all the puzzles, but perhaps using layout to force them into individualized sequences).
Would Do Differently
- Stage 7 should have gotten more of a lesson embedded in it. It's generally the least favorite stage among both players and myself.
- Would have considered ways to have partial success, perhaps you only need all the gems from X amount of stages. Could lead to either extra replay value (with some stages being optional to visit) or a high score like appeal. This might weaken the teaching of early levels though.
- An automatic game over detection algorithm would've been nice.