As one of the top designers for puzzle games, Jonathan Blow has paved the way for simple puzzle designs with a twist with not just one game, but two. Even though both of these games are different in terms of their main mechanic to explore the level, they both follow the same puzzle design philosophies and principles and excel well with teaching the player about the mechanics without a segmented tutorial.
But first the game starts off with a showcase of the basic mechanics of the game, usually starting off with a straight walk to where you will find your first puzzle. Where Braid is platformer that starts you off in a Mario-esque fashion beginning where the player is started off to one side and is forced to move to the left and where the Witness starts you off facing the first door where you will eventually wonder toward. Both of these games, don’t tell you the controls for basic movement when you first open up the game and will only hint at it if you don’t move at all. This tells me that the game is meant to have a very basic control scheme with a focus on added mechanics in the form of gameplay and not added button presses. Throughout both games, you will have an interesting variation of the core puzzle mechanic. It’s the philosophy that the you can have high-level expressions with a base of low-level concepts. This mean that if you have a good solid foundation for puzzles, you will have the options to branch out in many directions which implies that you will have a complicated game with simple mechanics. You are able to tell from the creation of Braid, that not everybody enjoyed playing Mario again so the creator added an interesting twist, this being the time warp, to the mechanics and adding pieces as a collectable to a puzzle that you needed to collect in order to proceed through the levels. This may have turned a lot of players away from the initial design as puzzle platformers aren’t as popular as first person games. With this in mind, I reckon the creator of Braid made the game with that notion in mind and made a game for gamers with a focus more on 2D platformer enthusiasts. To create interesting puzzles in the game, the developer tries to emphasise the core mechanics (being the time rewind in Braid, and maze puzzles in The Witness). This is usually overlooked with many puzzle as some developers try to create cool looking puzzles by using/adding more mechanics without refining the core concepts of the original mechanic. In Braid, in “world” the time rewind mechanic is changed in a way that ties into its platforming genre e.g. in World 1 you press a button to move back time if you miss a jump (works as a safety net), the way it works in World 3 is when you move the character back and forth you are able to change the flow of time and gives you a different approach to the same puzzle. In the Witness, the completion of the maze is made a little harder by giving rules that you need to figure out for yourself. This does resemble the “add more mechanics” approach to its design, but these puzzles are instead directed toward world design by having these puzzles placed in interesting areas of interest. |
World design theory (WDT)DevelopersThe goal of this blog is to relate current and past attempts at world design to further improve our understanding. Archives
October 2017
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