Quandary 10/10/2013

It’s been a full week since my last update, which I think is a solid way to update this journal so I can just summarize the week. Everything is going quite well. Will has just finished the grid code so we actually have movement, although I’m unsure on iOS. Josh is making excellent progress on the new menu. And I’ve been working on some levels. The level design process has been really challenging, I read an article about a guy creating a portal level with the level builder Valve created. He had a general idea of what he wanted to do but when he got to making the idea he found it to be too easy. So he kept adding on elements so it became more difficult, the more he added, the more he made his friend test to see if it was challenging, and the result was brilliant. I didn’t expect to learn anything from the article, but the more I read the more it easier to make challenging puzzle levels. Not to say that it’s now easy to make my levels challenging, but it helped with the process. The thing with Quandary is, we don’t have portals to play with, infact we don’t really have anything to make puzzles with. So I took the liberty of making pressure plates after thinking about it for a while. I was thinking of adding more but I feel like just the one mechanic can make the game fun. These pressure plates activate a variety of things in Quandary, for example one can activate a door and another can add time to your progress. This has made it much more fun to design levels, I can be a bit more creative. However I haven’t shown the team yet, so tonight I’ll be showing my progress to them. The game overall is going well. We’re on track. Next week we’re expecting to have a non bugged build running fully on the app store, so hopefully all goes well. I’m actually quite excited.