New levels with a new design philosophy! news - Magnetic: Cage Closed

Hello again indie gamers and developers! This time we're going to talk about moving on with the production of your game and what we at Guru Games will be working at for the coming month with Magnetic. Our first hour of gameplay is good enough and we need to move on in order to make the game longer and more interesting. You can see the trailer for how the game currently looks below or at YouTube:

Anyhow! We're now moving on to new areas and new places for the players to explore inside the Cube Network of Magnetic. Like many puzzle games, such as Portal, understood during their process of creating a game, we also understood how boring it can be to be stuck in one area that's always the same. In our case, this is the Testing Cubes which the player spends the majority of the game inside. After spending hours inside these chambers you want to see something else. You want to see what's outside the large Cubes which you've traversed through. We have therefore worked with an area in which the player can get outside and be on the Cubes, solving puzzles over a larger area, making large leaps from one cube to another with the help of the Magnet Gun and so on. We also want to make this an area where the player doesn't have to solve puzzles 100 % of the time, but also explore the world and see that the facitlity where the player is actually is a large prison and not just the Cube Network.

Concept Art for the large chambers where the Cubes are moving around

Making areas where the player can breathe and explore is something important for us right now. Successful games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent works with this alot (in my opinion) and creates areas in which the player gets a moment to just breathe and take a break from immense gameplay. We have therefore started designing a few levels where there is not alot of Magnet Gun interactive gameplay, but more story focused in order to make the game world more alive.

Concept Art from an area which is more focused on the story of the game than intense gameplay.

Concept Art showing a broken pathway inside the Cube Network

So guys. What do you think about these design philosophies, good or bad? Is there anything you feel that most 3D-puzzlers are missing out that you'd love to see in a game? Talk to us and let's have an interesting discussion about the subject at hand!