Mechanics Build Pt.2 (Final Game Project)
When it came down to what I learned and our preparing the secondary meeting with the ENDGAME team, it was important that I had a better idea of what was being created, now this was initially quite difficult at least to be extensive with some ideas, as I already had ideas on some narrative element but now was the time to be consise with the mechanics which we wanted to implement .
So with our decision of taking inspriation from Portal, we already knew we wanted to keep it in a first person perspective, but it was important to keep that perspective to allow the player to really feel they are player this character. (The Actual Character release date is TBA).
First thing was to create a general structure of how I wanted the game to at least work, because I had no idea of where to start even with the initial mechanics in place of Expelling and Absorbing electrical energy. So I knew from general Game Design, it’s always best to understand how the difficulty cap was supposed to be going from really easy to challenging as the game continues for player, keeping that FLOW. But I also had to narrow down what I needed and I thought of something quite ingenious to keep the game of our content going, first just design the beginning of the game as if it was a normal story with Acts, which then changed into Chapters. It basically followed this formula:
How many Chapters do I need > How many Levels can be in each chapter > How many puzzles can be in each level
This gavee me the structure I desperately needed to create the puzzles in each level estimating at about 5 levels per chapter to keep things easier to design and if add extra content, monetisation methods can be used and we cna further that design, if necesarry.
Next thing I learned was to slowly and gradually introduce new mechanics to player as the game goes along which allows to player to truly learn how the mechanics work, so it was important to make a board of when each mechanic is introduced when designing to organise the learning stages for the player, so I can question myself “Is this enough time to learn, or is it too long or even too quick?”
Those result however will only work when it comes to testing unfortunately, but at least I can visually see if the time to learn these new mechanics from a player perspective should be good enough.
Finally with all this in mind, it was great to also start making the steps to how the player should complete these puzzle, again starting from simple to more and creating necessary dips if needed when a new mechanics is introduced for the player truly understands what they are doing and for the beginning I wanted to player to just expel the electrical energy and then learn how important absorption is. This will be refined during making but even narratively this could work and having those in collaboration, I would find its much easier to create the steps, but having vague ideas still works as you can see below:
