alright. fantastic. fox flux DELUXE now has candy. you can run around and collect huge arcs of jelly beans.
but, lo! something is wrong.
one big way games can be categorized is by how much information about the game state is generally available to a player. in a game like chess, the entire state of the game is represented by the arrangement of the pieces on the board, which both players can see at all times — thus, chess has perfect information, and the only thing you don't know is your opponent's strategy.
on the other hand, in a game like magic: the gathering, you don't know what's in other players' hands or decks, or the order of cards in your own library. with this imperfect information, an entire set of mechanics around information control emerge: you want more information, you want your opponent to have less information. you also have to devise your play strategy in such a way that it works against any (or as many as possible) opposing cards, without knowing in advance what they are.
sidescrolling platformers, especially of the puzzle variety, have mostly perfect information. you can't see the whole level at once, but you most only care about what's going on in your immediate vicinity, and you can generally see what that is. it's 2D, so nothing is hidden by your camera angle, and there isn't even an opponent scheming against you. you see, you think, you execute.
that means that you can look at the screen and already know what's going to happen. which is fine, but in a way, it feels ever so slightly... static? you've already plotted your path in your head, so you've essentially already completed this part, and now just need to execute.
this isn't a huge deal. it's a very small deal, in fact. it's the sort of deal that i'm not sure anyone else even thinks about. but it is a teeny tiny bit of a deal, and the sort of deal that feels like it could add up over the course of a longer game.
what i wanted was just a little bit of mystery.
mario, of course, already has this. question mark blocks are one of the most iconic elements of the franchise. what could be in there? who knows? i mean it's probably a coin, but what if it's not?
i think that's cool. it puts something on the screen that doesn't immediately explain itself. it draws you forward. it gives you something to fiddle with.
and i love fiddling! it's one of my favorite parts of games. that's what i love about doom, even — it's so heavy on switches, things to fiddle.
so i wanted something like this myself. but i didn't want to do Hey Look It's The Mario Thing Again. not least because it just doesn't make any goddamn sense; you bonk your head on a solid cube, and something comes out of it, and now it's a more solid cube. what? why? no one knows.
this game takes place in an existing world, and while i'll do some handwaving for the fundamentals of sidescrollers — why does all this stuff float in midair? — i would still like the objects themselves to be somewhat accountable. i want to have things that make sense as things, even if it doesn't entirely make sense that they're arranged the way they are.
enter the gift box.
i mean, the whole game is a gift from cerise to lexy, so why wouldn't it be peppered with smaller gifts?
the gift box is solid until you jump into it from underneath, at which point the lid falls away and the collision goes with it. that lets you get at the contents, which are physically inside the box. this has some interesting effects:
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i don't have to have an alternate version of candy for putting in gift boxes, e.g. mario's auto-collect coins or the physics-enabled coins you can sometimes find in wario blocks. it can just be regular hovering candy.
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i have the opportunity to arrange the candy in different ways. a lot of spare creative energy has gone towards making different little patterns of jellybeans that still fit within a gift box.
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i can put whatever i want in gift boxes, as long as it's smaller than the lid. but they can do more than just candy, too. there's one gift box in the demo that spits out a (slightly alarmed) vaccoon when you open it. you don't need the vaccoon for anything; it's just a little surprise.
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i always felt like the empty question mark blocks left a trail of... cold, "dead" blocks in my wake. gift boxes simply open and fall away, which to me feels like i'm tidying something up.
also the way the lid falls over is just very satisfying to me. i don't know what it is. i just enjoy it a lot. i would probably open gift boxes even knowing there's nothing inside at all. they're like a fidget toy. they're nice to fiddle with!
But there is an elephant in the room
so, the gift boxes are solid, and once you open them, they are no longer solid. and that... really, really, really invites "puzzles" like this:
it's almost a trap for the unwary level designer. because it feels like a puzzle — we have a set of objects, and interacting with them one way will yield success, but interacting with them another way will not. is that not a puzzle? and it's so simple! who could resist?
but it sucks. it's not just that you can softlock this contraption; that isn't quite enough to write something off, though it's close. the real problem is threefold:
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you can softlock this contraption before you realize it's a puzzle, meaning you never had a chance to solve it in the first place.
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the game trains you to perform the action (opening the giftbox) that causes the softlock. until now, it's rewarded you every time you've done so! so not only has it subverted your expectations here, but it's mocking you for... what, not having expected it to trick you?
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as a result, a player who has encountered this puzzle even once will likely be skeptical of every gift box for the rest of the game. they INSTANTLY change from being a fun fidget toy to being a suspected trap, every single time. the player may never trust them again, and rightfully so.
after a couple early experiments with this sort of "puzzle", i resolved never to do this. and to the best of my knowledge, every single pickup in the demo could still be obtained even if every gift box were deleted from the game.
but i've still had a few players comment on how as soon as they realized that gift boxes were destructible platforms, they became slightly more hesitant about opening them.
i can't very well demonstrate via gameplay that i'm not going to do something unfair, of course, so i'm not sure what else i can do about this. but for what it's worth, hearing that made me realize that i've trained myself out of standing on gift boxes at all while playtesting.
so i know there are a few places where gift boxes work as shortcuts or alternate solutions, or even let you solve a puzzle earlier than you could otherwise... but they are, generally, intended to always be safe to open. they are presents, after all.
