One of the most important inspirations for this game was the Portal franchise, it affected the design of the game, it's theming and genre. I was watching a several hour long lecture online about how teams come up with game mechanics and ideas and one of the games brought up was 'Portal'. The lecture spoke about the importance and method behind ordering puzzles as well as what makes a puzzle hard.
Puzzle design-
Here are some of my most important notes from this lecture:
Difficulty depends on:
-How many steps are required
-How many new mechanics and information have been introduced
-How these new mechanics are applied in the puzzle
Rational puzzle design involves:
-Introducing concepts in an orderly fashion so the player isn't overloaded
-Preserve the macro flow
Whenever you design a puzzle you need to think about:
-What the puzzle is there for, is it there to tech a new mechanic of the game or is it there for plot.
-What does the puzzle achieve?
-What does the puzzle teach the player?
The lecture then moved on to talk about how the plot of the second portal game is structured. How it follows the basic idea of rising and falling action eg. the action slowly increases until you reach the climax of the game where it is very tense. In Portal 2, the action slowly rises as you attempt to break free from the facility to the point where tension is at it's highest when you must battle Wheatley. After this battle the game reaches it's resolve as the tension is reduced massively.
As the game progresses generally the difficulty rises with it, every time the game reaches a new benchmark for the story the difficulty is generally bumped up at the same time. With each difficulty spike the amount of puzzles in this segment is usually reduced. For example in Portal 2 the first segment of the game consists of 20 levels which are the easiest difficulty, however when the difficulty increases in the next benchmark of the story the amount of levels decreases to only 4 due to them taking longer as they are harder. With the final segment of the game only having one level as it is the hardest part of the game.
Puzzle games like Portal use a technique of using 'breather' puzzles every 5 puzzles or so, allowing the player to have a bit of a mental break while still allowing them to progress through the game. These breather puzzle will be slightly easier then the other ones in their difficulty level.
Game design-
These were the references I used when designing my characters, it also includes inspirational
images that I was using for my dungeon crawler game before I switched.
All of these items of inspiration have helped me develop and improve my work to a high standard that I am proud of.
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