As developers and designers of Everend, we have made many design decisions throughout Everend’s development. Deciding that we wanted the main character to be an owl was one of the first and biggest decisions we had to make, and that decision held true throughout the whole development of the game. But the thing is, there are many decisions made that were either scrapped or changed throughout the development process as well. Some of the biggest changes we have made have even involved some of our core game-play mechanics. For example the mole and the push-able rock have gone through plenty of these changes, both of which I will touch on below.
When we were figuring out what kind of puzzles we wanted to add to Everend, we came up with the idea of using a simple mechanic like pushing around a rock. We then added other mechanics to it in order to make those puzzles more complex. Simple right? Well, that didn’t turn out to be the case. The functionality that a rock was able to be pushed was never really the issue that we dealt with though, the issue that was dealt with was that we never really liked how it felt when pushing the rock. What I mean by this is that we changed how the controls worked while pushing the rock several times, but we kept the basic functionality of pushing the rock the same.
It may not always be easy to make a decision that changes the development process, but sometimes these decisions are necessary in order to make the game better overall. I know that we all are happy with results of all the iterations of the pushing rock controls, so it was all worth it in the end.
As mentioned before though, the pushing rock was not the only thing that changed through our development process. An even bigger decision that we made was changing how the mole would react to the player. As the pushing rock was more of a controls change, the decision to change the mole was a complete game-play change.
Originally the mole was designed to run away from the player when they would have a lit torch and it would move towards the player when the they didn’t have a torch. After creating the prototype of the mole we realized that there just wasn’t enough game-play involved with the current version of the mole so we decided to make a change. The new mole was designed to perform a charging attack when it is angered by a torch. The mole will then stay on the attack until the player figures out how to defeat it. And that is for you the players to figure out. 🙂
Overall, many decisions have been made and changed throughout the whole development process. Whether these decisions were made to cut, add or change things in the game, we have almost reached the end of the development process and it has been full of hard decisions that have shaped Everend in many different ways. We can’t wait to let these decisions be shown in full to everyone when Everend is released.
Everend DevBlog 