Enigma Escape

When deciding which game actions to link to the buttons I made a list of all possible game actions and mechanics I could think of for a platformer game. Since assembling the controller was already novel and complex enough I decided it was better to keep these game actions simple so that it is easy to tell what a button does as soon as you press it. So I ended up with just the basic actions like moving and jumping with only a few more complex mechanics like a dash and a crouch. 

We wanted to encourage the player to switch around which buttons were on the controller multiple times so I designed the levels in a way that didn't require every button at once. This put the focus on assembling the controller, while figuring out which mechanics were needed to reach the end of a level became like small puzzles. I made every level completely visible on a single screen so players would have time to plan ahead and see which buttons were required. 

Part of the game is that sand will start rising as soon as the player starts moving through the level. I came up with this idea to prevent the player from swapping around controls in the middle of a level, since we wanted to encourage the player to do that at the start of the level instead in order to make the puzzles work. Other ways of preventing players from doing so would requires us to say "no you can't do that" in one way or another, which would not be in line with the spirit of the game.

One of the things I realized while working on this project was that sometimes a level tries to introduce too many new gameplay elements at once. After realizing this I added new levels in between the already existing ones to only introduce one new element in each level. The biggest example of this was that in order to reach the end of the level that introduces the "attack" button, you need to leave out the button that allows you to walk to the left. This level introduced a new mechanic while requiring a solution that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this new mechanic. Therefore I reworked the level and added an additional level afterwards that does require the player to forgo the "walk left" button as a solution to the puzzle.