![]() ![]() Any puzzle game can create a solution, tear it apart and then get you to put it back together, but with our puzzles they’re so unlike traditional puzzles that they’re more like a task - a puzzling task - than a puzzle. You can create a really clumsy and convoluted solution that just barely works, or you can make a really tight and elegant solution. It seems that often with SpaceChem and Infinifactory there’s a wide spectrum of success. A lot of the puzzles in the workshop are: "Here’s something we managed to do that’s really strange, see if you can figure it out too!" So it’s a totally different kind of puzzle, and I often have no idea how to complete them. Ours are designed to be very open ended, and not about "tricks," necessarily, but just building different kinds of things which require thinking about how you’re going to construct things. So… kind of like SpaceChem, we have this quirk where people think our games are hard with the puzzles we make, but the user-created levels are always so much harder, and already that’s the case. The primary reason, though, is that it’s hard to telegraph to players that, "Yes this game is out, but the scope of content and what you see in the game isn’t final, and it might change, especially early on." Letting players know that we are listening to them and want to build the game around their reaction.Īnd you’ve got Steam workshop support with Infinifactory, right? How’s that been? It seems your motivation for doing Early Access was slightly different to that of most developers, in that you wanted to sidestep people judging the game before you’d had a chance to adjust it to the public. ![]() I talked to Barth about how things are going with Early Access, as well as why the small indie studio decided to invest in a fully voiced story in an abstract puzzle game, and what it's like to have Jon Blow and Notch publicly playing your game. With its swarm of conveyor belts, pistons, and welders, Infinifactory extrapolates the ideas that Barth established with SpaceChem, translating them into 3D which understandably increases the complexity of the puzzles Zachtronics has created. Thus having additional problem solving techniques at my disposal than I felt I should have really didn't make a difference, as I didn't feel the need to use them ever again either.Gamasutra talked to Barth back in October about his motivations for this approach, and the benefits of having people play a game that isn't considered finished through Early Access it appears to have worked out exactly as he wanted. Hence why I said "no biggy" about the spoiler thing yesterday, as the game was essentially over when it happened, I just had no idea that was the case. After that, I don't think I had to put serious though into any of the remaining puzzles, and while I enjoyed each of them, I didn't feel particularly challenged by them and just kind of breezed through the rest of the game. Honestly though, I think the difficulty curve peaks towards the end of world 5, ironically, precisely at the puzzle that has been much discussed with regards to spoilers. ![]() I've avoided talking about it for spoiler reasons, but there are at least a couple of levels in the last area that had be lol'ing :) The one with the mole creatures, and I just wanted to say, I got a big BTW feeling about it :) Might have been better to only unlock that option once you've completed the level and/or whole game and had two different sets of performance statistics you're evaluated against, one for default settings, and one for with adjustable input speed. It tends to suggest to players that if they aren't operating on max speed they are somehow doing things wrong. Not entirely certain about making it adjustable as a design decision, especially given that the performance graphs are being evaluated for machines operating on a completely different set of parameters. Gives me a good reason for a second play through :) Yeah, I figure for later game it would require an entirely different solution to do things on max input rate, which is one of the reasons I decided to leave it alone. Sure, I'll try to push it up after the design is finished, which usually works to make it a bit quicker, but the difference between MAX and the one below is very large. Gilberreke wrote:I'm only at world 3, and I'm quickly turning it down more and more, so yeah, I assume it's only viable for early game to have it always on max. ![]()
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