Following on from last week’s Level Building blog, this week I’m going to go a bit further into specific puzzle design and introducing new mechanics to the player.
A poor joke.
One of the new mechanics that we are seeking to introduce to the player is passive projection. In this, we have a block within the world that is able to cast a projection, and that is operated by the player stepping onto a button.
It looks like this:
We’ve based this idea of the way that players are introduced to portals in Portal. The gun is placed in a fixed position and sends out portals to set locations, allowing the player to understand what is going on, without giving them too much power too early.
So what I’m trying to teach the player in this particular puzzle is that standing on a button will cause the projector to fire and create a projection of the yellow square. And that the projection will be completed when the player steps off the button.
The first version looked like this:
The button is located behind the projector, and is directly in front of the player upon them spawning into the scene. However, in this setup, the projection of the yellow block ended up being cast outside the right hand side of the screen, and this meant that the player wouldn’t know what their action was doing. The fact that the yellow block is moved to the new location is one of the core principals of projection, and it is important that the player realises that this is what is happening.
So I moved the button to be between the projector and the block. But this caused problems at first, because the player could get caught in the projection:
So I adjusted the level so that the button was lowered further below the projector until the player was out of the line of effect.
No the player can see that the button has to be pressed to continue (having already learned that in earlier levels), and when they step onto the button, the projector fires, casting the yellow block to a new location. The player is in a position to see where the new yellow block is placed. And the player learns what these blue blocks do.
That’s a very simple run through of introducing that mechanic to the player. I’m building levels in sequence at the moment that will gradually introduce new mechanics to the player, over a five level series as follows:
- Introduce a new mechanic in a simple version
- vary the operation of that mechanic so that the player learns how it works.
- Introduce a secondary mechanic.
- Show a couple of puzzles with both mechanics combined
- Finally, a larger challenge level where the new mechanics are used in different ways that require the player to think a bit harder about how to progress.
And then I just have to do that around six to ten times for all of the various mechanics and puzzles that we want to use. and by that point, we should have a pretty reasonable game length!