dev.log Violet — Designing and testing
I loved the design challenges we did last week! I realized I completely forgot about those little paper challenges at restaurants, but I remember enjoying them! It was interesting trying to think of a completely different game though, I was so used to crossover puzzles and word searches for this format of games. One concept I wanted to try was wordplay, so I ended up pulling ideas from Baba is You, a puzzle game where you push around words to create different contexts for sentences. The game involved moving around. I needed a different way to incorporate that, so my partner suggested doing a maze.

The basic idea is that kids would follow the maze at the top to create and fill in a short sentence of their own choice. Then, they would use the crayons to draw the sentences they created. To be honest, it’s a lot of steps and I wonder if it would’ve been too much for a kid or if maybe the process could be refined.
Coming up with the idea was definitely fun, but I can already tell it needs playtesting before I would actually put it out to be seen. I got really shy when it came to presenting the ideas because I knew it wasn’t finished. In truth, I’m nowhere near as shy as I was in the past, but it’s still a part of me, frustratingly enough.
Take five of your favorite games and plot them on the play matrix. Describe what pattern you see. What does this tell you about yourself?
- Octopath Traveler — Mental/Skill, with a little bit of chance
- Okami — Physical/ Skill, with a bit of mental
- Ace Attorney — Solid Mental. It’s on rails, so there’s no real skill/chance
- Monster Hunter — Physical/ Skill, with a bit of mental
- Bastion — Physical/Skill, with a bit of mental
…Well to start, this tells me I really, really like Capcom games. And another thing, I tend to stray away from any games that involve a lot of chance. To be fair, I actually play many more RPGs than I listed here, but even then, those only involve a slight amount of chance in most of the battles. I really enjoy being in control of my own actions, figuring out what the problem is, and tackling it from there. I love puzzles, and I think when there’s a game that involves physical coordination and skill, I try to figure that system out like it’s a puzzle. Chance has a tendency to frustrate me because I feel like too many things are out of my control and I’m not making progress. So it makes sense that I would only enjoy chance if I had more sense of control or skill, like how I would build my characters in an RPG.