Mechanics Build (Final Game Project)

What I’ve learned from puzzle games and going over various different YouTube Videos and articles is that puzzles are very mechanical based and with narrative elements helping or at least leaning into the main idea. This isn’t always the case, but it helps a lot fo get everything together thematically. Now my job was the sort out the mechanical side (well actually level design, but in this case it’s one in the same or that I just really want to design…. who knows) They are little examples to the left of what I looked into regarding design.

In most cases, there are heavy mechanic based puzzles and they don’t take much inspiration from the story, or the story is the main driving force of the puzzles. Either way, for the theme of Impulse I think that there needs to at least be a consistent theme throughout and we are hard stuck on this idea of transfering electrical energy which personally I think is amazing. Just you know streaming that electrical enegry through your veins, it’s cool stuff.

But with our already determined mechanics being absorbing and expelling this electrical energy, it’s now time to drive the other mechanics which help the overall experience and what I’m finding is that mechanics for puzzles at least becasue this is handcrafted one, there are gonna be mechanics added whilst the player is on the journey to slowly introduce these ideas and make sure the player understands what they are doing.

For our game, I did ask myself some questions which can later be developed into mechanics as the one thing I have learned is that with puzzle game, the player needs to be educated slowly through the experience but also guided through and made not to feel bad about the failure. So this lead to my list of possible mechanics that could be added. With that, I’ve come to the conclusion I want the player to hold at least 2 charges of electricity to diversify the play, having one would be too simple, but adding two can add some layers to the ‘electrical transfer’ but obviously one rule should be absolute “Everything need power to work” so let’s work with that.

Adding on to that, I want to create at least the first three levels of the game to create some structure, for now I’m focusing on what the player’s goal is within each level, following a similar process to Portal where there are about 3 puzzles in each level. Considering I don’t know the theme currently as we have all our goals I’m finding it difficult to render the idea of what props or obstacles the player will face, or at least more specific props and/or obstacles so far, but the general goals for the player is simple and it should transfer later on.

Here’s my current work for it:

For now, I’m going to work on the visual aspect from a top-down view, and once I’ve done that, this should be presented to the team so the ball can get rolling