Update 9 (10.01.2015) – Puzzled?I haven't written in my journal for a long time and there's actually a rather practical reason for it. I was simply out of paper, I had none. But why didn't I have any? Well... that's a bit of a strange and winding story, but I'll try to be brief.
In my last entry I mentioned a weird black smoke and suspected that it might be a siege or some sort of magical anomaly and since it was still there after a good night's sleep, we decided to take a closer look. It wasn't a siege, but a strange force field in a shape of a dome and something magical was indeed trapped under it.
I had heard tales of these so-called fire fairies or flamesparks as the Ystnafians called them, but seeing them with my own two eyes was something else, especially when that something else appeared before me under such circumstances.
There were dozens of them, sphere-shaped and flame-winged with burning eyes and sparkling orange fur and it seemed that for some reason they had been sealed under an unyielding dome of magic. All of them together formed a huge bonfire-like mass that kept bombarding its prison with ferocious flares and released dark puffs of smoke whenever one of them dared to get too close to the barrier. You could almost smell the scorching stench of fear in the air and great pain reflected on the faces of each and every one of them. So, we decided to do what any sentient being with a conscience would do and set them free.
I will not go into exact details, but we managed to come up with an excessively far-fetched and convoluted plan that consisted combining our inventory items with nearby environment and a completely random thingamajig I picked up weeks ago. And although the whole process and the final solution looked fairly ridiculous, it worked like a charm.
While most of them scattered to the four winds when the walls came tumbling down, one little fellow decided to follow us and become a third member of our party. A new cute companion was kind of fun and exciting at first, but soon became extremely annoying and tedious, mainly because our sparky friend enjoyed consuming everything I tried to write on. I thought it just had a thing for wood and paper, but when I switched to animal skins, it also devoured those like a ravenous Modnarian mountain wolf. I think I even began to understand why those troublemaking rascals were locked behind that damn force field.
This went on for months and despite all our efforts to get rid of the critter, it stubbornly remained by our side until last week, when we finally managed to barter the thing off to one of the local farmers. I think she stuffed it into a stove or something. Anyway, I'm now back into my journal writing habits and since I have gathered lots of stories and ideas in the meantime, I will be sharing them pretty soon.
I'm pretty new to all aspects of game development and next to drawing and animating, designing interesting and fun puzzles has been one of the biggest challenges so far. Actually, one of the reasons I decided to make a cliché themed game was to study the existing games, their design and approach to puzzles and learn from them. This means that there will be a lot of common and familiar puzzles from other adventure games, but whenever possible, I'll try to spice them up and offer alternative solutions. For example, I'm planning to have a new take on pixel hunt and find fresh creative uses for such legendary adventure game inventory items like the crowbar or the blue cup.
The core of the puzzle system is of course the 4-verb GUI, which means that (at least in theory) all objects, characters, hotspots etc. react somewhat differently to each verb. This in turn will lead to multiple solutions and may occasionally require out-of-the-box thinking. Some of the puzzles also depend on whether you choose the wizard or the warrior, as one of the paths will be more magic related and the other requires more brute force.
For instance, the image above illustrates an item combining puzzle that requires you to interact with an actual inventory bag (not finished yet, some items are missing). This one belongs to the warrior and therefore contains weapons, armor pieces etc. and the wizard’s inventory hat will obviously have potions and scrolls and other such stuff in it.
I'm not a huge fan of extremely difficult or convoluted puzzles, so the game will probably end up being on the easy side and hopefully as logical as possible. Of course, taking into account the game world and it's peculiar inhabitants, magic and other weird fantasy gimmicks may be used to explain some of the puzzles.
Thank you for reading and please don't be shy to post comments, argue or ask questions.
