I started pre-production on my next major project about 2 weeks ago and I realized I need to start Posting about it to hopefully share my enthusiasm for the project. I do have a title for it that's about 99% locked in, but it's not ready to be shared because it needs some additional context that isn't ready yet.
I've been busy laying the groundwork by collecting references, sketching concept art, designing characters, detailing mechanics, fleshing out the story and, most importantly, making puzzles. It's too early to give any details, but yes, it's another puzzle game. It's heavily influenced by some of my favorite puzzlers: Outer Wilds, La-Mulana, Void Stranger and Tunic.
The master design doc is around 3000 words long and growing quickly, especially now that I'm figuring out the sequence of progression. This just means how all of the clues and puzzles connect together to lead the player to the end of the game. This is definitely the most complicated part. My strategy for designing this so far as been:
- Create a few (4-5) major progression events and come up with a preliminary ordering for them.
- Between each major event, determine what clues and other information would be needed to get through it.
- As I come up with new puzzle ideas, look through my list of clues and choose one that seems appropriate to the puzzle to create a minor progression event.
- Reevaluate the ordering and swap things around if it makes more sense, adjusting details to make it work.
- Go to step 2 recursively with the new minor event.
Keeping the major events roughly evenly spaced is pretty important for pacing, but the pacing of a puzzle game heavily depends on how quickly the player recognizes and understands the clues and puzzles. I'm cooking some ideas for how to mitigate that, but it'll be a long time before I know if they actually help.
This project is much, much smaller than Project RyME. My target for feature completeness is the end of 2024, and I'm expecting about 2-3 hours of playtime. I'm terrible at estimating playtime, and scope creep is a hell of a drug, so it might end up more like 3-4 hours. A 6 month dev cycle is pretty ambitious too, since I still work a full time job, so one year is my more realistic expectation.
I've had the idea for this project brewing for a number of months and I've only become more excited to make it real over time. It's not quite a "dream game", but it includes elements I've been really interested in, and wish more games used.
I'll update again, hopefully within a month, with some new details which will likely include the title and a few character designs.