For the first three years of development, I was still going to school part time and working a regular job part time, with whatever time remained being spent on Endora’s Box. The project started when my sister (Nichole) and I simply wanted to make a horror game. We were inspired by popular titles of the time like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Undertale.

As this was the first game I worked on seriously, I was still inexperienced. I jumped right into the programming and design without any sort of prototype or testing. The goal was to build a short playable demo to get people interested, and also build a toolset to make future development easier.  After three years of work, we had at least 40 minutes of content done.

# of rooms + boss fight. We both played it and couldn’t really enjoy it, we had people test the game and none of the puzzles made sense to them. We had a long conversation and decided that the demo we had made was not the game we wanted to showcase. After taking a hard look at the content we had, we pulled out the things that were good and cut out everything that wasn’t working. It was a hard decision at the time, but it was absolutely the right decision.

I began prototyping new puzzles (campsite door puzzle paper prototype tested with friends and a stranger in the park. [Show paper prototype picture] Link to great door puzzle that talks about how it uses the Character’s position as an input variable. This was a challenge to myself, to build a puzzle around a joke (CAN). Some players will understand the joke and be able to finish the puzzle instantly, but other players would need further guidance (after much testing I came up with the blue line possibilities for LOGICAL players, and the three paper notes for ADVENTUROUS players. [Show great door picture]

Decided that the inventory and point and click system was deep enough to explore further, and this was something that our first demo lacked. New puzzles were based around collecting and combining objects (Link to separate post: Kitchen recipe puzzle tests how well you can follow directions)

Rooms too large, hard to re-use assets, hard to split up background textures.

 

Too many power-ups (orange, green, blue, red, flashlight) The only one that felt like a finished product was the Blue power up (a blacklight sort of mechanic that reveals hidden text) We cut out all of the other power ups, since they were diluting the experience. The blacklight power worked well as a guidance mechanic (link to tutorial design post), as well as a device for teasing out some optional lore (picture of writing on the wall)

 

Generic chase sequence that added no interesting interactions.

 

Boss fight, while thematically interesting, was not fun. Interacting with environment objects while trying to dodge projectiles.

 

Mouse trap “Puzzle” and I use that term lightly, had almost no interactions for the time and resources it took to make, was not fun and boiled conceptually down to a list of ambiguous tasks.

 

We wanted to add a layer of harder, optional puzzles that reveal more of the lore and story of the game. (Basstion’s puzzle, Simons disks)