Dev Blog 9 - An Odd Design Decision

So after a few hours of fruitless tinkering (and some time away to think) I've made a somewhat odd decision. This could totally bite me in the ass or be the wrong design decision, and I'm gunna consult my professor on this, but I think I'm going to remove level selection altogether.

The reasons are two-fold. First, the obvious one, is the issues I'm having with the consecutive loading requirements I wrote about in Dev Blog 8 (below). Second, is because I think this could add some decent challenge to the game.

Right now, Enigmatic is fairly easy. Once you've solved the riddle, there's some challenge in the gameplay itself, but not much. Once you've solved all 20 riddles, game over.You can breeze through the entire game multiple times to get a perfect score easily after that.

But if players had to play each level consecutively, that might do 2 things:

• Engage the player more - if the player knows they have to beat all 20 levels in 1 sitting, lest they have to repeat levels they've already played, they might be more engaged (or they might just uninstall the game straightaway).
• Challenge the player more - along the same vein, if the player gets stuck on a riddle, they can't simply quit and think about it for a day or two and come back (they could leave it paused of course!). This challenges the player to defeat that riddle on the spot, or accept that they'll have to replay some levels.

And now here's where things get interesting: my professor suggested an awesome idea to make Enigmatic more cohesive - have 1 final riddle that is a culmination of all of the answers to the 20 riddles. This "final boss" so to speak, would add a decent amount of challenge to the game, but would REALLY add a lot of challenge if paired with the removal of level selection functionality.

Admittedly, this could be a terrible design decision and make the game much less fun. But hey, I can't learn without making mistakes, right?