When I Forget Things

Last year, had the idea of making a PC version of Snake Island, primarily for Steam but not exclusively. It’s mainly an experiment, mind you.

The plan was to have two more chapters, 20 levels each. Full of enthusiasm and inspiration, I went on to make 20 levels for chapter 2.

Priorities shifted and I switched to finish Underground Football League instead.

Yesterday, opened again Snake Island and said, “let’s give chapter 2 a play-through”. Much to my surprise, I can’t remember how to solve the puzzles. I’m getting old and my memory is not what it once was, but surely it shouldn’t be this bad 🙂

Lesson learned: when developing puzzle games, record a play-through during development phase. Not only it will be useful for you in the future, but it will help if you plan on growing and attracting viewers to Youtube or social media through this kind of content.

I’ve always wondered how players see my puzzle games in terms of difficulty/discovering the puzzle “gotcha”. When you’re deep into design phase as a solo developer, it’s often one of the things you overlook because you often don’t have the resources to spend on this (focus groups, community, etc).

Coming back to the puzzles after one year it’s basically starting with a fresh player mindset. Admittedly, chapters 2 and 3 are supposed to be difficult and take tries to figure the puzzles out, but there are rough edges to the general game design that should be addressed to make the puzzles less obscure. Yeah, literally, because some of the new puzzles action happen underground 🙂

But during normal development process, you don’t have the luxury to postpone the project until you’ve forgot how to play it. So there’s really no good solution to this problem other than relying on experience and early releases/demos.

Anyway, stay tuned for the Steam/PC version of Snake Island. Soon-ish.

Unless I forget about it again, in which case feel free to remind me.