Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Grundislav Games Dispatch!

This month I have a brief update on Project Lion, but I mainly want to focus on one aspect of the design that I have a lot to say (and possibly rant) about. Let’s get right to it!

Project Lion

Since the last email, my design document has grown from a completed 4 out of 7 chapters to 5 out of 7. I’m still on track to hit my goal of having the game fully designed by the end of June. Fingers crossed!

I’ve spent some time working on backgrounds and managed to complete two. One is extremely spoilery, so I’ll just show part of the other (it’s a scrolling screen)

I also had a nice preliminary chat with the game’s composer, and I’m extremely excited about how the game is going to sound.

But to say anything more would be a spoiler, so let’s move on to…

A Puzzling Development

Project Lion marks either a return to form or a departure from my usual depending on how long you’ve been playing my games. By this I mean the focus isn’t on choices or branching narrative, rather I’m designing a traditional linear story adventure game with non-linear puzzles.

Rosewater and Lamplight City in particular received criticism from the more hardcore adventure game fans for either being too easy, too linear, or not having any puzzles. In truth, it’s been a very long time since I designed an adventure game where the gameplay focus was on puzzles (Shardlight was more puzzly, but more on that game later)

The challenge, of course, is figuring out how to design puzzles that integrate well within the game’s world and story, and don’t just feel tacked on or superfluous. Then there’s the added challenge of figuring out the appropriate level of difficulty or complexity (two very different things) Obviously I don’t want to go into detail just yet, but I will share some general thoughts I’ve had during the design process when coming up with puzzles.

• The most important thing to remember when designing a puzzle for an adventure game is that proper communication is key. Always have a way to nudge the player in the right direction without blatantly telling them the solution. The mantra should be “how would the player know they should do that?” (special thanks to Dave Grossman for that tip)

• Puzzle complexity has always been one of my weaknesses, so it’s been very interesting working on figuring out how to make puzzle chains with multiple steps that don’t devolve into absurd logic. But it’s also been very creatively rewarding!

• A great way to come up with unique puzzles is to remember your main character’s abilities and personality. I mentioned Shardlight previously: the main character in that game was a mechanic named Amy. How many puzzles involved her actually fixing anything? Very few! So for this game, I’m focusing on keeping my player character’s abilities at the forefront and designing puzzles that play to those abilities and attempt to subvert the usual tropes of adventure game puzzles while not straying into the territory of unrelated mechanics or mini-games.

• Having multiple puzzle chains available at once makes a game feel more non-linear, but can become overwhelming or repetitive. A good way to keep things feeling fresh is to alternate between sequences featuring multiple puzzle chains and more “closed” puzzle design.

Other News

• I decided to apply to speak at AdventureX. I’ll still be there whether or not my talk gets accepted, though!

That’s all for now. See you in June!

Francisco