Hi, all! Today, I wanted to talk about puzzles in our game! I am not going to go into specifics, you can figure them out yourself when you play the game. As the tech lead on this game, I have been primarily responsible for the implementation of our puzzles, which means figuring out the logic behind a puzzle. This has been quite a struggle for me, but it is something that has helped make  the world feel more alive while playing the game. If you were asked to get something that is alive, it would obviously not stay still. So in making some puzzles, I have also been doing work on the aminations. 

Working on animations has been both fun and frustrating. My first attempts at one of these animations showed the true chaos behind game engines. You might look at a game engine that is used throughout the games industry and think that it must be perfectly formulated, but they truly are not. I had one animator in the scene, and the animated object would be replaced entirely randomly by another completely different object. This other object, despite not having any sort of animation associated, would perform the animation of the first one, while the first one would perform a ridiculous exaggeration of its  actual animation. After figuring out the chaos behind this, I then still had to think of the logic in the original puzzle. 

Regarding other puzzles that I have yet to start on, I know that they are going to require work on my base code and update the systems that I have already spent so much time on. For example, there is an upcoming puzzle that will involve the dialogue as a hint. However, I know that this is going to have to be specifically interaction based dialogue so that it will not just be caused by collision, or starting the level. Knowing that, to make our game's world feel more lived in, and create more difficulty in the game. While we don't want the game to be super difficult, it also has to feel like you are not just collecting things with no difficulty. This is to keep the player from getting bored, since games that are cozy still need goals that cannot be reached simply - just look at Stardew Valley. 

There are also some very fun puzzles to put together, that specifically create some great chaos in our own game.