The First Delay (Loc Part 4)

Time crept by and suddenly August appeared! Where did the time go?? We technically had a game. Solve was still decently broken, tile movement was a little finicky, but we had something. So we sat down together and looked at our options. Unanimously we agreed to continue working on it during the school year to get the game as polished as possible.

We set a tentative deadline for a new build at the end of October as we planned on entering into the IGDF student category and with that a hopeful launch date of sometime in late December.

School started and instantly we took advantage of it. Champlain required all freshmen and sophomore EGD (Electronic Game Design) students to attend the QA lab. Since all other student games were just getting off the ground we had them all to ourselves. Wow, did it make a difference.

The response from the lab changed everything. I threw out all of my 99 level designs I did over the summer and over the next six months remade them all as a result. The game was sliced down to 69 levels total, eight in the first section, and twelve in sections 2-6. With the final level having its own section.

So here is the first thing I learned from that lab that prompted the complete overhaul of every level in Loc: Make the game as simple as possible!!!!!

Which it became clear I didn’t do. Testers enjoyed the game, but it took a long time for them to understand it without instruction from me, which in unacceptable. Every game will not ship with its own dev-in-a-box who is going to walk the player through the game. So the first levels redone were the 1-sided ones which basically all come in the form of a question to the player. Level 1-0 asks, “Can you move a tile?” and 1-1 asks, “Ok, now that you can move a tile, rotate it.”

And so on and so forth, baby steps are needed before the player can get off and running. The major genre bending mechanic doesn’t even come into play until 2-0, eight whole levels after starting the game! So the reason why section 1 only has eight levels, when the others have twelve, is due to fear. We convinced ourselves that if we had twelve people would get the idea of the game at around level eight and then put the game down thinking they had seen everything.