Dev Blog 01 - Puzzles

Hello everybody, my name is Carson Johnson, and I am one of the programmers for Vessel. I also am one of our Puzzle Designers so today I wanted to go over my process of how I designed puzzles and our team has turned a scratchy notebook sketches into a nicely modeled puzzle concept!

I started off designing this puzzle by thinking about what kind of mechanics are unique to our game. Our main mechanic revolves around two “Vessels”, which are humanoid constructs that represent an old person and a young person. The player can switch between Vessels by looking at the other one and pressing a button to become the other Vessel. The Vessels have different mechanics that are tied to themselves. The old Vessel can see certain things that the young vessel cannot, like details about the Artifacts and hints for the puzzles. The young Vessel can jump around and is much more mobile than the old Vessel.

So, with all these mechanics in mind I started out by wanting to use a specific mechanic, and something that jumped at me was the old Vessel’s ability so see things the younger one cannot. Having this hidden information aspect has been very intriguing and separating the Vessels has been something that I want to do as well.

(Firstly, please forgive my horrible handwriting and drawing abilities, I am not one of our fabulous artists.) I structured this sketch using a lettering system to help me structure the flow of what the puzzle would look like. The player starts out in the young Vessel, and they have the task of collecting a certain number of Artifacts in an enclosed space. Once they have placed all the Artifacts, a window will open in the wall where they can see the old Vessel. Once the player swaps to the old Vessel they will be able to see that these Artifacts have a specific order. Once the player places the objects in a specific order, they will be able to leave the room and complete the puzzle.

Our artist Whitney Philips took my idea and expanded it thoroughly. They implemented that idea and fleshed it out into a fully diagramed tutorial puzzle. Our current goal is to get this puzzle implemented into an alpha prototype.

This is our grey-box model of that puzzle and we are developing all our mechanics to implement into this. All the Curators are working very hard at this and we look forward to sharing more with you about Vessel!