Robot Heist development diary

ROBOT HEIST development diary - May 11

I've taken a first crack at the levels that will make up Act Two of the game. (That's the part where Val and Harry are finally reunited and the player learns to make them work together to solve puzzles.) Act Two has four levels so far -- two of them work pretty well and two of them aren't there yet, I think.

Of the new levels, Level 10 feels really strong. The characters start this level apart, having been split up in the previous level. They're in narrow little tunnels -- like crawling through ducts -- that are trapped with lasers and patrolling guards, and they have to hit buttons and open switches to help each other out, even though they're physically apart. It works really well and feels very HEISTy. When they come back together at the end of the level, that sets up a good segue to Level 11, where they'll actually steal the thing they're after. (Not sure what it is yet. Something gold and computery.)

Levels 7 and 9 still need a lot of work. Level 7 is the first level where the characters are working together, so it should be introductory, but it feels a little empty right now. There's not enough going on yet. And Level 9 has a promising hook where Harry is rerouting guards to get them out of Val's way, but it doesn't quite work yet. There are supposed to be three different positions the guard can be in, each of which blocks a different path, but it's really hard to get the guard to stop on the middle path without specifically intending to, because the window of time to do that in is so small. And my goal for the level is to have the player accidentally complicate Harry's path in the process of clearing up Val's path, so that they actually need to return the guard to Val's path after she's passed through to the safe zone. I need to either figure out another way to implement this level or to change the way guards work.

Pretty much all of the Act 1 levels need another pass, too. The new levels have me feeling really confident but they also highlight how weak the first levels I made were. I hadn't really gotten a good sense of where the game was going yet when I made them, and some of them will need a lot of reworking. Level 5 in particular is really muddled -- the idea of relying on guards to block lasers is a good one, but this isn't a good take on it. I think most players will just be confused by it. Level 4, though -- where the player relies on a guard to open and shut doors -- was a solid idea from the beginning and doesn't feel like I could improve on it very much.

Most of the other changes have been cosmetic: I redesigned the player characters again. Since they have different abilities -- one pushes things horizontally and the other vertically -- I want the player to be able to tell at a glance which one does what. It was often hard to tell when they were rounder and more similar looking. I changed them so they looked more like arrows, pointing in the directions they could push, but now i've changed them so they look more like shovels -- they have shovel parts that appear like they actually grip pushable objects in the directions they can push, and can't touch them from the directions they can't. I'm still not sure they communicate what they're supposed to, but they're definitely better than the arrow designs.

The other big thing is I added another style of wall, to help differentiate the "bank" area of Act 2 from the "prison" area of Act 1. First I tried to redesign how the prison area looked so I could use the wall style I already had (it looked cool) for the bank. I tried a lot of really grim / dour-looking colors, but the problem was that the characters, who had been colored to pop from the existing greenish wall style, blended in when I tried darker, bluer walls. I ended up designing a new, more yellow / gold style of wall for the bank, and decided to keep the existing green walls for the prison. The green and gold walls compliment each other pretty well -- I realized that instead of having the bank be all one color I can introduce the new style but keep using the old one, too. The new gold walls could represent more central rooms of the bank, while the familiar green walls could represent tunnels and ducts and side areas that the protagonists are using to get around the bank's security systems.

Next, I'm going to do another pass on the Act 1 levels, then make my first attempt at sketching out the Act 3 levels. The plan is that the valuable object they're stealing will actually be a pushable object that they'll have to manipulate by using their abilities. It'll have all the qualities of other pushable objects -- it can hold down switches or block lasers -- but they'll have to work together to get it through each level, because one of them can only push vertically and the other horizontally. The player's had to coordinate those abilities before, but this object will hopefully give them a locus to really force them to plan and exploit that teamwork.