Underliner Devlog #17 (May 1, 2022)

If you haven't wishlisted Underliner yet, do it now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1927220/Underliner

The game development is officially done, so this post would be more like a post-mortem than a devlog.

In the beginning of the development, which is around January this year, It felt really really hard to design puzzles. But interesting thing is, it got so much easier at some point. Maybe around early March. I don't know the exact reason, but it's probably because of the change in goals of the puzzles.

Early in the development, the puzzles' goals were "hitting a certain object". But when I design puzzles that requires this goal, They always ended up too confusing to solve. Even if it was an easy puzzle. Then, I was playing with some code changing colors of puzzle objects, and I suddenly thought the puzzles could be better to have a new goal: Hitting all the puzzle objects.

Designing puzzles became much easier after that decision. It's really interesting because I came up with this idea thanks to my experiment with some codes. I remember Jonathan Blow saying that he created some of the core rules of Braid while he was programming. He often uses this anecdote to explain his view about the importance of being able to program when it comes to game design.

Underliner will be released on May 4, 2022 at 7pm PDT. I think you might like it if you liked puzzles game like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll. Even if you didn't like these game, I suggest you to give it a try! :D

Wishlist Underliner on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1927220/Underliner

Thank you.