After I completed all puzzles and did two playthroughs, I started doing the soundtrack. I looked for a few music tracks from the same artist and recorded my own sounds, which was tricky but fun.
Then I thought that the game was finished. I sent the link to someone who started testing it and instantly – accidentally – bruteforced it and thus circumvented a large portion of the game. 🙁
As usual, the following part contains spoilers of the game, so don’t read on if you want to play it yourself.
The Pair Machine
This made me pretty sad as I thought that I designed the machine in a way that discourages trying out random combinations by making it move slowly.
After moving the first lever, the transport mechanism would slowly move below the tray. After moving the second lever, it would either move the tray one position up or return to the original position if the combination was wrong.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t slow enough for the player to try out some combinations and as soon you had 5 combinations that worked, you were done with it.
It was bad luck that the idea the player had of this puzzle matched the design idea that I had: To not use a symbol more than twice.
For some reason, the player thought that he was supposed to solve a machine with 7 random symbols that he had never seen before in the game. This was super unexpected.
Now there was the solution to tell the player “No, I’m not gonna try some combinations. I have yet to find a hint for this.” (like the new Alone in the Dark does when you try to open a safe without having seen the combination).
In the mentioned game this works nicely, but in my case it would be different from any other puzzle in the game and finding out what hints you have and need to use to solve something is a major part of the game, so this would feel like some unexpected (and unwanted) handholding.
Then there was the cheapest solution to make the machine very, very slow. And the very expensive solution to create 5 new combinations that did not follow any pattern, so it would be harder to find them by chance.
In the end, I’ve found the (in my opinion) most solid solution to not give feedback before all 5 combinations have been entered. This makes it very hard to find out which one of the 10 levers was wrong.
So, now the tray will move up after each pair has been entered and after the 5th it will either fall down or eject the key.
This was a very interesting (although saddening) experience in the test phase of these puzzles and I am glad that it occurred now and not after publicly releasing the game.
The Mirror Room Pictures
In the mirror room (internal name) there are two pictures on the walls which have a weird pattern on them. Lots of years ago, those pictures were known as some sort of optical illusion as you could look at them cross eyed and would then see some things in 3D.
The fun part of this puzzle was to see whether anyone would remember those and would solve it right away by looking at the left picture like this.
The tester instantly did the cross eye thing and got the directions from the left image.
And then… tried to do the same for the right image. But the right image has a different purpose: It is there in case the players that do not know this trick. The idea is to take a snapshot of the right picture, flip it horizontally and put it onto the left picture. All irrelevant pixels will cancel each other out and only the directions will remain. Although the right picture looks similar, it is no valid optical illusion picture, so you will not be able to see anything easily.
This fact was the only thing discouraging the player from trying to get something out of it until then. I realized that I just forgot to add enough hints here. It was totally unclear that the left image was the one you should try to solve and the right one was just a tool.
I thought about lots of things to solve it and asked the AI to give me ideas. There were quite a few of them and they were not really bad:
- Add different lighting for the left and right picture, so the right one was more in the dark
- Add cracks or some markings on the wall around it to make the right one seem wrong or broken
- Add discolorations, markings or errors to the image itself to make it seem wrong
- Add graffiti to the images
I tried out the cracks, but that looked weird to me. I almost went with the lighting variant, but that would have been a bit over the top, drawing too much attention to it.
An arrow pointing left on the right picture like a Graffiti was the topmost idea until I discarded that for something more subtle:
A filled circle on the left picture and a hollow circle on the right one.
This gives a hint to overlay the pictures and flip one. I will also add a checkmark on the left (in the pattern), so you know which picture is the “unflipped” one.
Let’s see what comes up next…