Workshop Week 9: Designing a Puzzle Game

In workshop today, we learnt how to design. Earlier in the lecture class, the lecturer taught us the 8 steps designing the puzzle game from scratch.

The eight steps are:

1. Inspiration
2. Simplification
3. Design Specification
4. Construction Set
5. Levels
6. Sequence
7. Testing
8. and Presentation

The first 4 steps are the step to specify the rules and regulation while the other steps are to build the puzzles.

Our task this week was to design a puzzle game.

The first idea was my idea to create a game to save a child from a witch's magic spell. This idea came from a random movie with involves magic. The player needs to place mirror from the available mirrors to reflect the spell and lead the spell into something else or even the witch herself.

However, we thought that this was quite complicated and we changed the idea a bit. At last, we finally came with the new idea which also involved the witch along with her evil magic and a child. Moreover, unlike the previous idea, we used pipes instead of mirrors.

So, the game was simply to place and organise the pipes to lead the magic spell to the witch. The spell will go through the hole the pipe and the player needs to organise the pipe to lead the spell get back to the witch.

The rule is the pipes have to be organised perfectly, meanings that the holes between two pipes have to meet and interact with each other. If the one's hole meets another body of pipes, the pipe which wrongly placed will be destroyed, and the spell will bombard and get to the kids/witch's target.

Another rule is when the hole ends to a wall, and makes the spell touches the wall, the wall will also be destroyed and the spell will spread around and some of the spell will get to the child.

Whenever the child gets hit by the spell, then the game is over/re-play the level as the player is considered fail to protect the child.

The required skill to play this puzzle game is maybe lateral thinking.

The puzzle game types are item use and logic.

The goal of this puzzle is to protect a child.

The puzzle here are the pipes so the player needs to place/organise the pipes and keep the spell off the child. Player can manipulate the puzzle by rotate them. The puzzles can be chosen from the available puzzles given in each level of the game.

The game will roughly look like this:

Where the figure on the higher part of the screen is the child, and witch is the opposite way. Also, the available pipes will be listed in the lower part of the screen (this can be changed later).