Kimball Brooksby - Game Designer

Inspect & Interact System

The turnaround time for Syke was less than a year, so I needed to design a puzzle system that would powerful enough to support our experiential goals, but lightweight enough not to stifle the development of our other features.

Highly Modular - To make the most of our limited resources, puzzles pieces need to be built in a way that allows them to be used in multiple contexts.
Narratively Driven - Puzzles should convey story and emotion through the experience of solving them.

After some research, I found that puzzle-box-based systems encouraged close reading for narrative in a way that physics puzzles didn't, and would present lower time costs for debugging in conjunction with our other systems.
From this, I designed a collection of puzzle components that could be mixed and matched to produce a wide variety of different puzzle behaviors, consisting of sliders, dials, buttons, and locks.

Modularity Encourages Rapid Iteration: This setup let the design team take over puzzle implementation from the engineering team and increased our iteration speed, allowing our narrative team to more accurately assess how closely the emotion responses to our solving our puzzles matched the emotional beats we were trying to hit.
Having Resource-Mindful Approach: This approach required on our art team to produce unique visuals for each puzzle box though, which translated into a heavy lift for them near the end of Syke's development to ensure all the visuals were high quality and consistent.

TreeRingPuzzleShowcase.mp4

Inspection Functionality Prototype

CutsceneCamRefactorShowcase.mp4

Inspection Functionality In-Game

Of all the puzzles I implemented, one stood out above the rest: the pipe puzzle. It was the barrier to school level, so it had to prime the player for the coming puzzles without being so complex or boring that it'd block the player.

Slight Frustration - This puzzle needs to prime the player for the story of the school level, which focuses on the frustration of doing poorly in school.
Hidden Simplicity - Players should be able to find the solution quickly relative the the apparent complexity, so they aren't blocked from the school level.

The first iteration was a simple collection puzzle where the player had to fit pipes onto a grid to create a path from a spigot to a dry plant. In playtesting, we got feedback that this version felt like busy work.
In the second iteration, players had to reorient pipes that were already in the grid, but clicking on one would also rotate its neighbors. This version was more intriguing to players than the first, but blocked them too often.
The final iteration of the puzzle reduced the number of moves to solve and added indicators for the number of moves remaining, which allowed us to retain the interesting bits while reducing the puzzle's complexity.

Engagement is Not the Same as Enjoyment: This puzzle ended up being highly engaging for players, but took far too long for them to complete relative to the other gate keeping puzzles.
Providing Multiple Avenues to Success: We ended up adding an chalk tic-tac-toe game on the concrete near it, showcasing the correct solution, so players had another avenue of solving it that didn't require the brute forcing we observed in playtests.

Pipe Puzzle Flowchart

PipesPuzzleShowcase.mp4

Pipe Puzzle Prototype

PipePuzzleIntegration.mp4

Pipe Puzzle 1st Draft

PipePuzzleIndictorUpdateShowcase.mp4

Pipe Puzzle In-Game

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