Level Tweaks(Loc Part 5)

Other little details of level design became clear. Loc is basically a group of six 4x4 grids. These grids act independently, as the tiles cannot cross over from one face of the cube to any other. Which means that certain positions are more difficult to move tiles in and out off.

For instance if a tile is in a corner, it only has two options in which to move out from, while if the tile is in the center it has four available options, simple right? Well its not one of those fact that instantly jumps to mind. The following heat map shows the importance of every space on each grid.

I took advantage of this information and used it primarily to select the positions where gated tiles (ones that cannot be moved or rotated) should go. As a general practice the majority of gates tiles fall into the corner, for practicality’s sake. The player would no longer have to worry about moving tiles into  that location, which is the hardest to reach.

Another huge change that all levels underwent was a drastic reduction of the number of tiles that  each face can have. I created a rule for myself to never (except in certain circumstances) leave less than three and often four spaces available for the player to move tiles around with. This was done for two reasons.

1.With too many tiles Loc quickly devolved into a frustrating task of moving tiles around. It sometimes took way to many actions to get a tile where it needed to be. We wanted to distance our game from others like Cogs. Loc is more about the 3D nature of the puzzles, not trying to figure out how to move this tile from A to Z.

2.When a player first starts that game they spin the cube around, examining it, trying to figure out the best place to start. When there are too many tiles in a particular puzzle players often get scared the challenge. Loc just becomes too much and they want to quit. The number of tiles is intimidating. To counter act this response, which gets harder and harder to do in later levels which naturally have more tiles, the puzzles begin to rely more on using the edges of the cube to cut corners in level design and make the patterns (more on this later) each as simple as possible.

Another note that I needed to keep in mind is that Loc is hard; it is a difficult game because of its use of 3D space. A puzzle didn’t need to have a super complex path on the later levels; just making simple lines on five sides of a cube was difficult enough for many people.