Notes of Design Decisions

I made some notes while developing the game. They were initially in their own file, but I thought I'd put them here just to share. They contain spoilers.

Many of the design decisions were a work-around to the lack of implemented save feature and the problems that arise from it.

Player death

Throughout the game there are various opportunities for the player to die, and due to the lack of saving, results in the entire game resetting. This results in multiple problems that need to be accounted for.

Forewarning of death

Later game deaths are far more punishing than earlier ones since more content needs to be repeated to return back to the latest game state prior to death. This can be a problem if situations of possible death are not probably communicated to the player. These later deaths can be frustrating or confusing if opportunities to avoid them are not clear or forgiving enough. They no longer feel like punishments for player mistakes, but rather punishments out of nowhere.

To solve this, situations that can cause death deaths are more obvious in later stages, or if triggered, do not immediately result in death, and allow the player to recover if prepared properly. For example:

• The dying from starvation within the jail cell does not give the player many turns to prevent it, especially when the player is not familiar with the controls and what the player is capable of doing. This is fine because it is at the very beginning of the game and no progress is lost upon death.
• The guardian at the Temple harms the player unless the player makes the mistake of incorrectly answering the riddle. The player is also not immediately killed (unless they use a demon spell), but instead injured, meaning that players who prepared and have bandages in their inventory can heal the wound and continue playing.
• The creature in the mines gives over 20 turns of notice when it has appeared, and the player at any part of the cave has enough turns to leave the cave to safety. The creature also injures the player the turn before killing them, allowing for an extra turn of escape.

Tedious content

Certain game puzzles or moments in the game, while interesting at first, may become tedious or annoying if constantly repeated. This may be mainly due to the player knowing what they want to do and how to do it, but requiring multiple turns to complete the action. Therefore, these aspects of the game should be shifted to later on as to decrease this repetition. For example:

• Escaping the jail cell required multiple steps, which needed to be done in a timely manner or the player would be killed from starvation. Instead of shifting the content to later on (which cannot happen as this is the beginning of the game), once the player successfully escapes, any subsequent deaths results in all the objects necessary to escape already in the player inventory, and the mysterious figure does not appear.
• The vault was originally in the jail corridor, right outside the jail cell. The vault code changed between every life, and each number needed to be set individually. It was later moved to the entrance of the Mount Magna.

Alternatives to saving

For a game that takes approximately 2 hours to beat without a save feature, there should be some sort of checkpoint system when important points in the game are completed, so they do not need to be repeated. Spells are generally rewarded after certain game events which can be used to bypass that respective event. In turn, this makes many spells only useful if the player dies. To help with this, the spells and their effects are saved between deaths so they do not need to be memorized, although they are lost between different game sessions.