Puzzle-y thing, Ludum Dare edition

Hey peeps,

I wanted to make another puzzlescript game this weekend, then I saw a bunch of Ludum Dare posts from my friends on twitter and I was like, yeah we're doing this. I had a couple of ideas going into this that really informed the project. One of them was this game, the undertaking, by Anna Anthropy. It's an exploration of the ways you can create different feelings in a space just with some block placements and descriptive text. I knew I didn't want to make something that avant garde, but I want to get better at the thing Anna does so well in that game. Combined with the Ludum Dare theme "Deeper and deeper," I decided to try to evoke a feeling of claustrophobia while playing the game. Or at least the feeling that you're deep underground.

Another idea ingredient that went into this was thinking about difficulty. I think difficult puzzle games can be fun, but they're much better when you can tackle the challenges in any order. Puzzlescript isn't super conducive to this (as it's always linear), so I've been trying not to have my games get harder as I go along. Instead, I'd like to focus on the ideas of the levels, and making you feel clever solving them. Many of the levels in this game have multiple solutions, and I'm OK with that. 

The last nugget I was thinking about was complexity. For some reason in the past I've been really obsessed with the idea of reducing the number of objects in a game, and that being elegant and good. Fuck that! Now I like to think about things more from the player's perspective - does this make sense? Are elements introduced too fast to understand them? Do the rules in this game map to some real world thing that I understand and can relate to? Given all this, Sokodig is actually the most complicated game I've made in puzzlescript so far, at least from the coding side. However I think it's probably a little easier to understand than Forcefield, despite Forcefield only having one line of "code." That one line of code is just way less understandable than "I pick up a shovel and I can dig with it." Or maybe I'm totally wrong! I didn't playtest this game much, maybe it's totally incomprehensible.

Finally, I'm happy I got to collaborate with my friend John on this. We worked together over the summer and we've been having lots of design discussions since we started meeting every week, a couple months ago. 

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think of the game!

-Ezra