Hi guys Doug here, last week I was working on level layouts and some basic puzzle implementation. As such aside from a few placeholder assets the art has been on hold.
The main aim for week was to get a handful of tutorial levels blocked out and playable that act to introduce anyone to the basic mechanics of the game. The majority of the my time was spent using the CSG plugin in unity and constructing the layouts for the different puzzles. The other half of the time was simply testing out how things felt and worked with their current early implementation and highlighting areas for improvement.
One of the main things that came up early on was the scale of the levels themselves. I found our original idea of keeping the levels very small and trying to get as much in one screen as possible was very limiting and didn't feel great with the current movement. As such I experimented with some bigger levels with more opportunity to run about and get used to the control scheme as well as being a bit more forgiving by requiring a bit less precision.
As such they went from being this sort of size to the image below
I also got a fair bit more comfortable using the CSG editor and found that simply making the edges a bit more uneven and adding a simple texture made them look a lot nicer.
As for the puzzles the above level is intended as a basic introduction to dragging, all of the orange objects can be dragged and must be moved into place to gain access to the exit as shown below:
While messing around with this level we found that the actual physics of dragging the objects didn't feel great, we tried adjusting the mass of the objects and added a handle to the bottom of the objects to help them stick to the ground a bit more but it definitely still needs some tweaking.
We also managed to get a few people to play it later on in the week and got some great feedback. One of the most important things for me was that it wasn't fun to be punished by the movement system as it should be more free and enjoyable than part of the games challenge.
This was mainly prompted by the above section on the first level. The original level had a fairly thin bridge that could be fallen from onto a safety net below that forced you to return back the way and try again. The idea was to try and test players grasp of the movement system and have them prove their coordination before progressing. However after the feedback and realisation that we do want the experience to be more playful and fun than challenging it was swapped out for a safer, risk free movement section.
I'll let Henry explain some of the more complex puzzle pieces he implemented in a later post, thanks for reading!
Doug
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