When designing Piczle Cross Adventure I try to keep in mind several types of players and cater to as many of them as possible. Let's face it, everybody enjoys games differently and for different reasons. There is no "right" way to play games and though I try to "direct" the player somewhat in the end … Continue reading Completing Piczle Cross Adventure puzzles
Tag: Game design
Mini-games
Piczle Cross Adventure is mostly about following the story and playing picture crossword logic-puzzles. However, there is a little more fun and adventuring to be had outside of all that. There are some mini-games and mini-puzzles! When deciding on what kind of mini-activities to include and where I tried to stick to a few simple … Continue reading Mini-games
Dialogs
One element of the old-style RPGs we all know and love, and that persist in video games to this day, are the dialog boxes where the text appears letter by letter. Why these exist exactly is not clear. If you think about it they don't make that much sense. But they are part of video … Continue reading Dialogs
World design
When making puzzles for Piczle Lines DX the first step was to think of a category and then to think up 20 items that would fit such a category. This was by far the hardest part of designing Piczle Lines! Try it for yourself. Pick any category and think of 20 items in that category … Continue reading World design
Blueprints: In-game messaging
Aside from character dialogues Piczle Cross Adventure also features some basic in-game messaging. In Piczle Colors some information was broadcast to the player through a fake Twitter-style social media post pop-up. When the player reached a milestone, unlocked a level, earned a trophy or anything like that, one of the game's characters would "tweet" at … Continue reading Blueprints: In-game messaging
Interactive tutorial
If I know something about tutorials it is, frankly, that I dislike them. Quite a bit. As a player having to follow a tutorial, as well as as a developer actually creating a tutorial, both of these are onerous and annoying. However, when dealing with logic-puzzles that often have very specific rules there sadly isn't … Continue reading Interactive tutorial
Piczle Colors post-mortem
Something slightly different for this week's devblog, but that has a bearing on the development of Piczle Cross Adventure nonetheless: I thought I'd look back on the development of Piczle Colors and write down some of the lessons learned and observations made. Piczle Colors is currently available from the Nintendo Switch eShop world-wide and as … Continue reading Piczle Colors post-mortem
Adventure time!
The base of Piczle Cross Adventure is the nonogram puzzling. It's what the player will be doing most of. But what exactly is the "adventure" part of the title? What elements am I using to underpin the logic-puzzling gameplay? Piczle Cross Adventure will have an actual story that is more fleshed out than "even" Piczle … Continue reading Adventure time!
Creating the Piczle Cross puzzles
One question people might want answered is "how many puzzles will Piczle Cross Adventure have?" and the answer is, at this stage... I'm not sure. The game's initial design aimed at a minimum of 150, but because I spent some time building data-driven systems to handle the puzzles it is child's play to add more … Continue reading Creating the Piczle Cross puzzles
Feature rich design
The best thing about the simplicity of Unreal Engine 4, as well as some intensive planning, means that Piczle Cross Adventures has a slew of options to cater the logic-puzzle game play to your exact liking. Game options Obviously the usual music and sound effect toggles are present. This is a given for any game … Continue reading Feature rich design
