Pick Your Poison, Puzzles or Combat?

When our team began reconsidering the direction of our game, we kept getting held up on the core question of mechanics. We were shooting for a light-hearted concept in both narrative and style, so the gameplay had to match that. It didn't exactly work with what we currently had—a dash, a very linear fireball, and an axe throw (with an untextured axe, no less). It seemed to generic, and also too harsh for Ember. So what we had was another divergence in vision with some team members advocating for puzzle-based gameplay and others advocating for pseudo-combat: mechanics that would work like combat, but not be focused on destruction.

The fact that we were on a strict schedule didn't help–we really didn't have time to argue over mechanics. In fact, it was something that should have been decided long before. We decided that for the time being, we had to continue on the "pseudo-combat" path because that was what we had a prototype for, but the designers on our team lobbied for two weeks to try and come up with some puzzles.

This proved difficult and eventually, unsuccessful. There were too many questions to address, such as—what kind of puzzle should even be made? Should it be like something in a Zelda game, or is it more like an investigation kind of game? How do we tie that into the narrative? What reward does the player get from completing the puzzle—do they just get to continue or do they get an item or power-up of some kind? We kept hitting dead ends.

The pseudo-combat continued steadily, however, and we ended up having a breakthrough on that front. We gave Ember "internal" abilities, which had to do with healing herself and using her surroundings to charge her power. Contrasting this would be her "external" abilities, which were dedicated to expelling her powers outward and "cleansing" enemies of their curse. It wasn't genre-defining or game-changing but we felt like it was something that set our game apart and gave it a unique stamp. Puzzles never really took off and the only touch we have of them is that there may be an obstacle in the demo which requires calling on Mikhail to help clear. As of right now, the abilities are still buggy, and it's hard to know if this will be the right move (pun intended), but we'll keep working away at it.