Existing Puzzle platformers
Here are some examples of puzzle platformer games that I researched for possible inspiration:
The first game was called Recursion, this puzzle games used the ideas of manipulating gravity, bouncing items and the player as well as having destructible objects (either broke over time or on immediate contact). The game also introduced invisible objects later on in the game.
This second game Vertigo, experiments with the idea of changing gravity similarly seen Recursion, as well as teleportation.
This final game Night Lights has a very unique game mechanic that affects the environment that the player moves in. The player is able to manipulate the light in the scene which determines which areas of the environment are active / intractable.
I really liked the idea of having bounceable objects as well as some sort of functionality that changes the game environment depending on what the player does. Firstly I quickly made an object that you can bounce on. Coding this was very simple and used similar methods of functionality to the jumping and climbing code.
I had to create some new variables that were specific to bouncing, these included the Boolean variable 'canBounce' which would be true if the player is on a bouncy surface, the float (decimal value) variable which is the amount of force that will be applied to the player. The final variable I had to make was a public reference of a LayerMask type in which I could select what LayerMask an object will need for it to be considered as bouncy.
Here are the components that the 'bouncy' object required:
-LayerMask tag "Bounceable"
-Box Collider 2D
-Sprite Renderer (I used a random texture and tinted it green as I don't have a texture at the moment)
I was able to use some of the other universal variables that were in my script so I didn't have to create any more, these inlcuded: 'checkPos', and 'Radius'. These two variables were also used in the jumping code.
Creating the code for a bouncy object was really simple to code and implement and took a matter of minutes.
Puzzle design
The main components of a puzzle include a:
-Mechanic (the main ability of the player eg. in the Portal franchise the games main mechanic is to create portals).
-Rule (how the mechanic is supposed to be used to complete the puzzle - changing the mechanic changes what outcome the player will get in a puzzle)
-Consequence (the outcome depends on the rule that is used to determine how the mechanic can be used)
-Misdirection is used to confuse the player, this might be by making the player face a puzzle with the same layout as a previous puzzle but now with a different rule contradicting the previous methods that the player had used to complete puzzles - confusing their understanding of the puzzle.
This use of misdirection was spoken about in the video:
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