Perfect Ten Post-Mortem
The idea behind Perfect Ten was pretty simple. “I want to make a really hard game with the oh so clever ‘solve this puzzle in less than 10 seconds’ caveat.” Beyond that, all I could come up with was a simple teleporting mechanic, some spikes, and buttons that you press to solve each level. I tried my best to avoid anything complicated beyond just that and then the game sort of made itself. I did not encounter too many problems while making the game events in construct, other than figuring out how to go to the next consecutive level (it turns out the simplest things are sometimes the hardest to figure out how to do).
The teleporting mechanics are the game’s main feature and it turned out to be pretty cool. You click anywhere where there is whitespace and it creates a portal, and one second later the player teleports to it. If you create a new portal before your character teleports, it destroys the old portal and your player will teleport to the new one instead. Originally, it took 1.5 seconds, but it made the simplest of levels near impossible to solve in under ten seconds. To solve each level, the player must touch five different buttons and not fall into spikes. Trap doors were also added along with spikes that fall. The timings themselves were based on the different sprite animations. After making sure each of these mechanics worked, I decided I would make ten levels and then the game would be near finished.
I am relatively new to using Construct 2, and I am super glad I tried it out the week before the compo (obligatory “this is my first LD comment”). It saved me the time of having to learn something completely new in order to make my entry. So, the problems I ended up having were related to the thing I have never done before: level design. Making sure each level is solvable in under ten seconds, gauging how difficult each is, and putting them in the right order. So much time was spent playing, adjusting, and replaying each level until I felt happy about each one. When I got to a few of the “falling” levels I discovered that the player simply falls too fast for solving the level to be humanly possible. So, I started playing around with the player’s fall speed. It did give me the idea to add a level where the player does not fall at all, and has to teleport in order to change the height at which they are “flying.” An unplanned mechanic actually came out of my struggles with designing the levels.
Once I was happy with the levels, I spent the rest of my time working on music and sound effects. I used SFXR, and Terry Cavanagh’s new tool, Bosca Ceoil to make the sounds and music respectively. I made two different songs, but only used one and I am not happy with either one anyway.
The biggest problem in the compo version of Perfect Ten is the game’s difficulty. I like how the teleporting mechanics turned out and that’s fine, but the levels are really hard straight away and there are no simple easy levels to teach players the mechanics before the levels become increasingly difficult. It seems a lot of people enjoy the difficulty of the game, but they share the same sentiment. If I add any levels post-compo, it will be some really easy ones at the beginning to help teach the mechanics of the game better.
Sadly, I think a post-compo version will do away with the ten second countdown altogether. While it works well with the “10 seconds” theme, I would rather have a stopwatch that records the player’s best times for each level, and for each completed run through all the levels. That way, players who struggle with getting under ten seconds can finish the levels, and players who enjoy the challenge, can try to beat their old times. Doing this would allow for bigger and better levels, too. Perhaps I could add more simple puzzle mechanics. Buttons that change how fast the player falls, perhaps….
A few people got them all without hints, so it can be done!
