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This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.

The Flophouse

After the hiatus I took to finish up some contracting work earlier this year, Bridgette and I finally met again last Saturday to discuss where we are and where we think we should go from here.

Long story short, we decided to scrap the first level. Here’s why:

• It did not have a very good hook to draw in the player.
• The use of Access abilities was not encouraged by the design of the level’s puzzle

Since both the puzzle and the plot seemed to lack any good places to make the changes we wanted, we decided to try making something more compelling from scratch rather than try to modify what we have.

We brainstormed for a bit and came up with a new level design that we think would address these concerns. What’s kind of funny is that the new level is inspired by an terrorism show on Netflix which I had watched recently. Specifically, the first episode of Terrorism: Close Calls.

The new level, which we will be calling the “Flophouse” level for now, involves a high-stakes counter-terrorism effort of which the main character/player is a part of. Knight is tasked with entering a flophouse where the suspect bomber stayed the night before to uncover more evidence about the plot, but ends up finding something with far-reaching implications.

Originally, I planned to implement UI in the game that would allow the player to “talk” with Knight in order to solve the case. However, it’s a lot of work for something that doesn’t really enforce the main mechanic of using your special Access ability to solve cases.

In this way, I feel like I’ve discovered something new about Access as a game. It supposes itself to be a detective game, but it isn’t really. It’s more like one of those logic grid puzzles masquerading as a detective game. Hopefully with this new insight, I’ll be able to create better puzzles for the Access in the future.