Ryan's Log

I was in charge of level and puzzle design for this project. I also did the scripting for the puzzles and other mechanics of the game. The premise for the game was very intriguing and I wished to take on a challenge, but I wasn’t prepared for just how challenging it would be. I tried to design puzzles that were interconnected between the viewpoints of the player characters, but the mixing of time and location really hampered the ability to make satisfying puzzles.  I thus made the decision to have the detective be more a clue than a major part of the puzzles. There are five rooms to the basement the player can explore. The first tutorial room is meant to feel dank and claustrophobic and give the player the idea that they are locked away somewhere. But upon using the power to see through the detectives' eyes the player can see which crates are push able and then escape the room. I choose to have the other rooms all be open at once to allow the player to more freely interact with the puzzles but also putting restrictions on the prisoners requires restricting the detective who already has a diminished role in the game. While the story has you captured in killer’s basement, I wanted to make it stranger and more unsettling and so divided the rooms into the hunter's room, the vault, the lounge, and the gallery. These strange rooms provide an ability to do more with the puzzles while also drawing the intrigue of the player. 

I had some challenges trying to get the different puzzle mechanics to cooperate with me. The Hunter’s room underwent many changes while it being made. I knew I had wanted to have the mounted heads and the statues and have the players identify patterns within them and trace that to the solution to the problem. The mounted heads were very uncooperative and required a few full rewrites of the code before I achieved something satisfactory. The sliding tile puzzle was another that took me quite some time to finish. The original idea was to have the player in some way see the full picture in one of the views but a torn and numbered one on another and by reassembling the picture they would get a code to the next stage. I was also quite happy with the vault puzzle and the hidden numbers dotted through the level. I felt it gave players a good reason to really keep their eyes peeled and make them focus on multiple puzzles at once.