Week 58: unstable keys and room 2

I spent this week working on room 2 and introducing some related game mechanics: unstable keys and key fusion. Unstable keys are keys that vanish after some time. They behave like some real-world particles, say muons, and decay after some time. Similarly to their real counterparts, unstable keys take longer to decay when they move. They experience time dilation! These keys can also interact with other kinds of keys: fuse into a stable key, etc.

And indeed my focus at the moment is creating puzzles around time dilation. While I have some puzzles in my mind, I am increasingly spending time thinking about new and better ones. I find it hard. On the one hand, I want the puzzles to be “fun to play”, but on the other hand I want them to be significant for special relativity. I want the game to naturally help players construct a mental model of how relativity works.

I managed to come up with a bunch of “scenarios” that I definitely want to include in the game. These are similar to my video on the ladder paradox. They are thought experiments, animations. For example, I brainstormed the creation of a relativistic walking robot. A level based on this robot could show how time dilation and length contraction are intertwined. I find it relatively easy to come up with these “scenarios”. I think they are cool and ultimately they can make my game stand out. The problem is gamifying them, constructing a puzzle around them.

For next week, I am thinking that rather than moving to work on room 3, I could instead take a break and work on these scenarios and animations. Maybe publish a new video. I hope this work could inspire me and lead me to design better levels and game mechanics. The downside is that the next game demo would be delayed a bit.

This week I also thought about many additional aspects of the game: cut scenes, storyline, sounds, music, visual effects. The good news is that a decent story is gradually forming in my mind. I’d like to soon introduce new characters and a dialogue system. Story and atmosphere are what made me really enjoy some of my favourite games. Music will then be important. For this reason, I am increasingly listening to more music and looking around for sounds. I’d like to work a bit on each of these topics and create a little fragment of what I want the final game to look and feel.