Puzzle Ptuesday: Game Changer

Hello friends!

The team is wrestling with some larger questions about the future of Puzzle Clubhouse, but work on Episode 4 continues!

We’ve finished the game prototype that’s more aligned with the original winning design - you can play it here! 

The goal is to press the two adjacent keys, forming a chain to grab the goal object(s) at the very end. Pressing the wrong keys or not pressing any keys when you need to will trigger a failure, causing the level set to reset. We have four levels increasing in difficulty.

After playing it for a bit, we had some discussions about how to improve it and where to take it from here. Here’s some of what came out of our meeting:

Current Issues:

• Lack of triangularity - the game currently has no risk vs. reward in it, which is common to a lot of rhythm games. This is sort of an additional thing that would be nice to have, but probably wont make its way in.
• Right now, this game requires you to look at the keyboard most of the time - Unless you’re a superstar typist, you’ll need to fairly often look at the keyboard for the key combinations.
• The keys that you press should be close together - right now they seem random and difficult to press. This can be ironed out fairly easily.
• Time changes are too slow - the right pace for the game will become apparent through playtesting.

Next Steps:

• Add the ability to make longer chains of characters. (Can reuse characters so there are duplicates of Jasper, Cornelius, etc.) Currently the game only supports 11 total, want more.
• Press spacebar to “engage” time machine - do we want to use three keys?
• Levels can be made up of smaller mini-chains; Completing part of the level will poof out the characters, clearing the board for the next group.
• Have a time machine that flies across - represents accuracy, like most rhythm games
• Time period should last fewer than 3 seconds – maybe 1.5 seconds. This will be variable based on the difficulty of the levels (earlier levels = longer)

That’s about all we have time for this week - we’ll check back with our progress soon!

Toodles!