Devlog #9 - Why Is It Called Puzzles?

"That's the puzzle!"

Welcome to another devlog! This week were going to give you a quick insight into something we have been working on, which as you can guess from the title, is puzzles. We have spent a lot of time working on our gauntlet abilities and getting them to a place that they can work in the world and feel nice to play with. We created some interactions that you can trigger outside of combat with these abilities, that we are wanting to start using for something deeper.

We want these puzzles to add a layer to the levels that you explore, without them being the absolute main focus. This means that players can interact with and figure out how to complete the puzzles to gain an advantage, like extra resources, faster routes or even a vantage point over a combat room. However players can still experience the same level by just using pure combat and brute forcing their way through.

In terms of interactions, we have made some of the abilities that use different elements do more. At the moment we have abilities that utilize fire, ice and electricity. In our code we have created some interfaces that allow these abilities to trigger actions on scripts that use the specified interfaces. One of the things that we have shown already is that when you use electricity based abilities on electrical components in the world, they cause surges which damage things in the vicinity. We felt like this was still too based in combat so we wanted to expand it more, so we started creating doors that you can open by using electricity on their power source. This started us thinking, what else can we do? So we crated a shiny new spreadsheet that we documented both new puzzle concepts [i.e doors that can be opened with electricity] and full puzzles.

This is an example of one of the puzzles we have created in this sheet:

Here this solution has 2 possible approaches that we have noted. The player can either use the teleporter to go up and down to hit the electrical box, or if they make it to the top they can throw down an electrical based ability to open the door. 

We are currently hard at work filling out this sheet and are hoping to have some really nice puzzles that players can interact with in the game. Hopefully we will have a build that you guys can test and try out soon to give a first hand look at these interactions and try out the game for the first time, so keep posted! 

As always make sure to follow us here on itch.io for your weekly devlogs and maybe a few cheeky test releases, and follow us on Twitter for some more regular updates from the team!

cám ơn and thank you,

Round Table Studios.