In the Beginning (Loc Part 1)

Loc was a cardboard box, which may or may not have once been a pizza box.

Loc began as a game called Cube, a project I worked on in Montreal. Originally it was conceived as “A Rube Goldberg machine on the face of a cube, where the player directs a ball, pushing things in order to create a path to the middle of the cube.”

So if that doesn't sound over-scoped, I don't know what is.

Looking over the design, I pitched that it should be simplified to three types of tiles and that the ball wouldn’t push the tiles, the player would just click on them. In the last few minutes before our proposal to the class I added the gate mechanic to ensure that the player needs to utilize all sides of the cube.

The screen shot to the right shows the prototype known as Cube. It has the base elements of loc, the three types of tiles, full camera rotation, tile movement and rotation, and a solve that kind of worked!

But it was just a prototype, the beginnings of a good idea. There was still plenty wrong even broken with the design at this point. So what did we know we need to change for Loc?

1. Art

As you can see the art of Cube is just so minimal it’s almost painful. There is nothing exciting about it at all, nothing unique. Everything was scrapped.

1. Tile Movement.

We could not figure out how to move a tile with a click drag. Just impossible to worry about in a 4 week production window, so we went around the issue. Click on a tile, it brings up a menu interface to determine which of the four directions the tile could potential moves. After clicked the tile moves into place.

While this worked for a prototype it slowed down the game exponentially. The movement interface was an unnecessary menu that needed to be ripped out in order for the game to be playable.

1. Level Design

The level design was simply done, without regard to actually making the game fun. As a result it was incredibly difficult, to an almost hair pulling degree. They were all scrapped as well and remade.