Devlog #4 news

The topics we will approach in this Devlog:

How we created the puzzles and the decisions we had to make until now ≽^•⩊•^≼ ₊˚⊹♡

Since the beginning, we wanted to do a puzzle game. It was the obvious choice for us, as one of our first big projects we didn't want to venture into combat or flashy mechanics. Also, puzzles were the only thing that made sense to put in our game, because of the Target Audience and the game type.

Our main inspiration was a little to the left, our game being about a cat organizing his new home It made sense for us to do puzzles related to objects of the house or decorations.

When we started we were a little lost, how would we make the jump between the main scene and the puzzle scene, when and where in the game? /ᐠ. ｡.ᐟ\ᵐᵉᵒʷˎˊ˗

So first what we had to do was to separate the game into parts. We had a garden, a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom. With this, we decided we should make puzzles by room. With that, we decided we needed to think of the puzzles and how much of them would be.

Our first-ever idea for the living room was to arrange books on a shelf. Our options were to organize the books by color, size, or thickness. We discarded the color since we were also trying to make a game with accessibility to colorblind people (something we will make a devlog only to talk about)

So we had two alternatives: Size and Thickness

That was when we decided why not make both and do two shelves! With Time we decided instead of making two Bookshelves, we make the top one a Book shelve, arranged by Thickness, and below Galos de Barcelos (a typic Portuguese symbol) arranged by Size •⩊• That way the puzzle was more composed and added a little more difficulty to the player (this because since the beginning we were careful to not make challenges to easy or hard, that way we would certainly lose the interest of our players)

This is a very bad version of the puzzle ≽ܫ≼ made by me (on paint :d) just to show how is supposed to look when we have art for it AHAHA well...

BUT THEN 🐱

I wanted to do another puzzle (Sorry pardal aka programmer and Delfim aka Artist) hihi,

The puzzle I wanted to make was about frames on the wall and why is this puzzle a decisive moment for our game. Well, I wanted the frame puzzle to be in the living room as well so logically this way we would have to make 2 puzzles for each part of the house. (Sorry pardal and delfim again)

But this puzzle was surely a problem for us, we already had a puzzle that we had the same problem but I will talk later. The problem was, that we wanted to make shadows on the wall with various formats, corresponding to the frames, and the frames would go on the shadows and once all frames were in the right shadow puff puzzle solved.

But there was no space for the frames on the screen, if the frames were on the screen we would have some problems like Frames overlapping and hiding each other which would be a pain to play, and a very very confusing screen full of frames and the shadows probably hidden. Just like this:

(This could very well be an abstract painting xd) The gray squares would be the shadows and the colorful ones would be the frames, now let's imagine there were 20 frames on the screen overlapping each other...terrible


After many many horrible ideas of how would we solve this (terrible ideas mainly from pardal :p (jk))

We discovered what would be our guardian angel, ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽ つ double screen-sized puzzle.

How would this work exactly: The puzzle space would be two screens in size, 1920x 2160, and the camera would go up and down through cursor navigation.

As you can see the red square would be the camera and it would go down when moving your cursor to the bellow of the screen. The star place would be the shadows and then the circle place would have the frames, the player goes to the down screen grabs a frame, and places it on the top screen, and on the top screen, you can drop the frame wherever you want it stays there.

In the end, the shadow for the frames ended up like this (still without art just my block out on paint):

We decided to add another mechanic to make the challenge harder because if the player only had to match the frame to its shadow would be very boring. So we made some frames the same size that way the layer would rely on another thing other than the shadow. And that would be a pattern, the frames with the same size would form a pattern that completes just like those two ovals I thought it would be perfect as a fish.

Just like this, that way the player must be able to identify where which frame goes by the pattern and it's a little more fun.

For the kitchen, it was obvious to make a drawer puzzle with cutlery, this is a simple puzzle, and there will be places to put the forks, spoons, etc.

The objects would be on the right side and the player would grab it and put it in the designed spot. •⩊•

For the second puzzle, we had the same problem as the frame one. The idea of the puzzle was to have shadows to put magnets and the player would put the magnets in the desired shadow. But where would be the imans?
With this puzzle, we decided that we would surely implement the double-sized screen in the second puzzles of all the divisions so that way there wouldn't be an odd one in the second puzzles of the divisions, so all 3 first puzzles were simple screen and the second puzzle would always be double-sized.

For the iman puzzle, there would be the same thing then, the imans would be on the screen below where the player would grab them and bring them to the top side of the screen, that way there wouldn't be too much noise on the screen.



(I was lazy doing this so I just grabbed a random pic of magnets and drew what missed ฅ^ >ヮ<^₎)

In the end, the puzzle would look like this, ofc the magnets will not be those, we wanted to do Portugal magnets (SIUUUUUUUU), and the name of our name character too with those letter magnets.

Finally the last two puzzles, those will be a little different, but not too much ;p

The first puzzle would be organizing clothes in the wardrobe.

The main thing here is the hanging shirts, those are going to have half-half patterns like you can see in the picture and the patterns would complete a sequence if the player placed all the shirts right (idk if this is well explained D:)

To don't leave the puzzle so empty we wanted (Just me) to add some shirts to the side that have three types of patterned shirts, each of them in all the different three shelves, and different shoes people will have to join the pairs.

The second puzzle is again on double screen puzzle.

Bellow we will have 9 plant pots and this will be almost the same as the hanging shirts, the plant pots will be half-half pattern and the player must arrange them according to the pattern. In the top part of thee puzzle will be two shelves and the player must place the objects according to the shadows on the wall once more.

We had a lot of fun creating our puzzles, and now our developer will work (hehehehe) to build the puzzles on game hopping everything works as we planned!!