I had a few game developer friends playtest the game last Thursday. The response was quite positive. I implemented a lot of the feedback I got from GDC regarding puzzle pacing, and it’s definitely much better now. By adding a few smaller puzzles that isolate specific concepts in between the larger puzzles, I was able to smooth out the learning curve, while at the same time not dumbing down those larger puzzles, which I really liked.
The new look is also working really well. Making lines vary with distance is still an issue, but it didn’t affect gameplay too much.
One feedback I got was that players have a hard time remembering which direction a box falls towards. This is especially an issue in puzzles where you have to have boxes from three different gravity fields all working together to accomplish your task. In this situations, it’s really important to know which direction a cube is going to fall, since sometimes you’ll want to avoid rotating onto particular surfaces.
A lot of people have suggested adding arrows to the boxes to address this issue. I finally got around to doing it yesterday. It took way longer to implement due to some unexpected issues with generated meshes not being saved into a prefab object in Unity, but it’s all done now.
Here are some screenshots of the new boxes in action. It’s definitely an improvement, especially since even when I’m playing the game, I find the arrows to be quite helpful.
