With such a large team compared to my previous project, it was imperative that we had a document that would provide us with direction for the game and rally all the members under a single banner.

I started out by doing research on the game loops and user experience of games in a similar niche, recording my observations of what worked well for them, and then sharing my notes with the rest of the team. 

Using these notes, I led a discussion with the design team to flesh out the pillars of our experience and the features we wanted to have in the final game in order to craft that.

At the end of all this, I took the diagrams and notes everyone had taken during the meeting, cleaned them up, and compiled them into a sectioned design document using Nuclino. 

Maintaining the documentation didn't stop there, though. As the scope of the game continued to shift throughout its lifecycle, I migrated the documentation to HacknPlan, then Miro, in order to preserve clarity and keep it up-to-date.

We needed a system to construct puzzles and iterate on them quickly that was also robust enough to handle the breadth of challenges we wanted to throw at the player. In our pursuit, we considered two different options:

The first option was a physics-based puzzle system like the one found in Portal. This approach, however, limited Syke to primarily box puzzles or platforming and left a lot of room for the player to get stuck when combined with some of the game's other systems, such as the dynamic gravity.

The second option was a puzzle-box approach like the one found in The Room. With this system, we could make individual pieces and connect them together to form a single puzzle object while retaining a large amount of freedom artistically and efficiency technologically.

This second option is the one I ended up implementing, as it clashed with the other systems in the game the least and allowed us to create a wider variety of narratively fulfilling puzzles.

Of all the puzzles I was given to implement, one stood out above the rest: the pipe puzzle. As the school level's gatekeeper, it had to prime the player for the school's puzzles without being so complex or boring that it'd block the player.

The first iteration was a simple collection puzzle where the player had to fit pipes onto a grid to create a path from a spigot to a dry plant. In playtesting, though, we got feedback that this version felt like busy work, so we changed it into a rotation puzzle instead.

In the second iteration, clicking a pipe would also rotate adjacent pipes, and it would reset after a certain number of moves. This version was received much better than the first, but ended up being too complex and blocking a large number of players.

The final iteration of the puzzle reduced the number of moves to solve and added indicators for the number of moves remaining, which allowed us to retain the interesting bits while reducing the puzzle's complexity. This version was very well received by players at large, and it's the one in the game now.