My game Legacy of Hamelin was a bit of a rush job, and crucially the levels were the last thing I made. Always a bad sign!
That meant that I didn’t have time to actually see if the puzzle mechanics worked or were interesting. Turns out they don’t really work, so what could I do about that?
A few ideas for the rat sections:
- Don’t let the rats go into the sewers until they’re all over a sewer. However, that A) seems weird in the fiction (stupid reason) and B) might make it hard in a not particularly fun way.
- Don’t stop the rats falling in the water in the first stage. But why would the piper care enough to restart? Not sure if I want there to be moves that kill you: that’s frequently annoying in puzzle games. Might be okay if I also had undo I guess?
- Make the rats poop, player won’t step on any tile with poop on it. Might end up with too much poop? Alternative: only make the rats poop after they leave the sewers.
- Add tiles which only the player can go through/only the rats can go through. What would these tiles be? Already have that the player won’t walk over sewers, but can’t really use that to limit the player’s movement because then it’ll be too easy to get the rats in them.
And for the children-stealing:
- If a child moves next to an adult, the adult grabs them until the piper moves next to the child and re-brainwashes them.
- If you move next to an adult while controlling the children, they’d attack you.
- Possibility of drowning the kids? A bit dark, not sure if people would pick up that you have a choice of drowning them or kidnapping them?
Additionally, people don’t immediately get what the aim is in the second and third sections. Could fix this with some dialogue from the mayor probably.
Not sure I intend to take the game any further, but it’s good to consider these issues anyway.
We just had Angband variant coding contests instead