A little earlier this year, I embarked on a new adventure developing a side-scrolling puzzle game titled Blot: A Perfectly Normal Puzzle Game. A strange title, perhaps, but all will become clear over the coming weeks and months. For now, I want to give you an insight into the game's overall design and the prototyping work I've done.
Design Philosophies
Blot: A Perfectly Normal Puzzle Game (Blot, for short) aims to do three things. These are the game's design pillars:
Keep the player discovering
Entertain through narrative
Challenge problem-solving skills
It draws clear inspiration from:
Thomas Was Alone (combining side-scrolling puzzle solving & narrative delivered via voiceover)
The Stanley Parable (narrative pitting the player against the narrator complete with 4th wall breaks)
I've also been inspired by a myriad of games that provide the player with simple tools that have multiple uses. The most recent example that springs to mind is Tears of the Kingdom, but I will of course be creating on a far smaller scale!!
Today, I'm going to talk a bit more about the player abilities I've been prototyping and how they're designed.
Player Abilities
One of Blot's pillars is continual discovery, and this is something I factored in when designing the player character's abilities. There are quite a few, but to help ensure I stayed in-scope, the purpose of each ability can be described in just two sentences. The first sentence describes the main purpose of the ability; this purpose will be spelled out to the player in tutorials. The second sentence describes a less obvious use for that ability; this is something the player discovers for themselves and may aid with later puzzles and navigation.
Ability | Main Purpose | Discoverable Purpose |
Basic Harpoons | Used to damage & destroy enemies | Used to knock batteries out of slots |
Battery Harpoons | Used to temporarily power machines (e.g. to open doors, raise platforms) | Used to overcharge enemies, increasing their rate of fire & movement speed. |
Deletion Harpoons | Used to temporarily delete a single puzzle object (e.g. doors, platforms; deleting a second object will restore the first) | Used to delete the player character, causing them to respawn at the last checkpoint. |
Munch | For a short period of time after activation, the player can destroy enemies by touching them | The player is immune to all damage for the duration of this ability. |
Jetpack | For a short period of time after activation, the player can hold jump to fly. | Passing through checkpoints while Jetpack is active extends its lifetime. |
Speed | For a short period of time after activation, player movement speed dramatically increases. | The player's harpoon rate of fire increases for the duration of this ability. |
Reveal | Reveals hidden 'hint text' in an area around the player. | Reveals a 'hidden' second narrator. |
These abilities allow for a huge amount of puzzle variety. I'm intending for Blot to have a runtime of approximately 3-4 hours, with the unlocking of abilities paced so that the player is continually learning and discovering, using their newfound abilities to solve increasingly complex puzzles. I intend for some puzzles to be visited twice, with newfound abilities (e.g. Jetpack) allowing the player to find a different solution.
All of these abilities will be tied into Blot's narrative, which I'll cover in more detail in a future Dev Diary.
Prototyping
I'm creating Blot using Unreal Engine 5's visual scripting language, Blueprint, and I've already prototyped all of the abilities listed above (both their main uses and their hidden ones). My abilities list originally started much longer, including things like ropes, grappling hooks, and collectibles. I knew from the outset that not all of these abilities would make it into the game. I investigated each during prototyping, and eliminated those I felt would require too much production time for relatively little player benefit.
Alongside the abilities, I've created several simple, flexible puzzle objects that will allow me to build a huge number of different puzzles. Below, you can see an example of Sockets in action. Early on, these are powered by bringing a battery to them; sockets remain powered for as long as the battery is in place. Once Battery Harpoons have been unlocked, the player activates Sockets by shooting past them, resulting in temporary activation.
Below is a second gif showing Deletion Harpoons in action. These are a late-game unlock allowing the player to temporarily delete a single gameplay object. If they delete a second object, the first one restores. I'll be colour coding everything the player can delete, providing a visual cue to show what can and can't be deleted.
What's Next?
Next up I'll be doing three things:
Plotting out the full game flow from beginning to end, complete with level designs & a first-draft script
Fully defining my player abilities, adding VFX, SFX, and details designed to improve the player's experience
Identifying weaknesses in my prototype Blueprints with the aim of refining them
Stay tuned for more. And in the meantime, why not check out some of my other work below.
Comments