Hello Puzzle PlayStation!
My name is Blair Lachlan Scott, writer and producer of Coin Crew Games. I'm excited to share how our design approach has evolved to deliver an exciting new experience in our first DLC: Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island.
Our design is evolving
After finishing the base game, we looked at our processes to set some goals for how we wanted to evolve as a studio for our first DLC. It has to be bigger, better and unexpected. After introspection by the entire team, we identified three fundamental principles to guide our final proposal.
Avoid repetition
After players progress through twelve levels of school, the last thing we wanted was for the DLC to feel like a modified Escape Academy. We wanted to see how far we could push our universe by taking players off campus and connecting the world to our academic environment. Threading the needle between these two goals, we arrive at one topic: summer vacation.
By sending the fugitives on vacation, he opened up entirely new premises and opened the doors to wonderful new rooms. Landing our players on an "island of no escape" also introduces a dangerous dichotomy between a "tropical island location" and a "mysterious scientific structure." The combination of these elements in the art design and level concept has created our most exciting and awkward room to date.
Delving into the narrative
At Escape Academy, we've gone to great lengths to make sure the story doesn't get in the way of the puzzles. We designed the story to be interesting at different levels of depth without losing the context of the level elements. After launch, we found that players wanted a story that was more connected to the gameplay and puzzles.
This feedback led us to build the DLC around a distinct, linear narrative arc where the level's premise and story were fully tied together. Our rooms will always be playable from start to finish without any narrative context. To make the game accessible, we hope that a closer marriage between level design and story will lead to more tangible action and deeper investment in the story, characters and world. .
Increasing complexity
Before Escape Academy, run by Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Salih, designed real-life exploration and game cabinets. There, an important part of the development process was rigorous play testing, something we carried over into the development of Escape Academy. This process was necessary to smooth out the details of the game and improve the user experience, but it revealed an important element. It was great when the crowd was moving throughout the match. This resulted in some players being able to handle higher difficulty levels without experiencing the improvements we had hoped for, leaving them hoping for a more challenging experience.
There are many levers to adjust the difficulty of the puzzle game. We have to be strategic about which ones we choose to keep them fun for our players.
Difficulty: How many steps are needed to complete the puzzle? There's a fine line between satisfying difficulty and a puzzle or puzzle sequence that loses its thread.
Quantity: Another "easy" lever in theory, but one that requires finesse. Our designers are passionate about how puzzles fit together and guide people through environments Jamming too many puzzles into a level can be detrimental.
Difficulty: How hard is it to figure out what to do with a particular puzzle ? This is the hardest nail because it implies a huge difference in mental processes between the players. For some people, a particular puzzle becomes an instant hit, while for others it can be the hardest in the game.
So... which lever do we want to pull?
All the world!
The levels of Escape from Anti-Escape Island are filled with challenging puzzles and tangled threads that are a natural progression in the evolution of our game design. The game's stable DLC was the key to balance. We hope it will be a challenging, rewarding and amazing experience for players.
yet to come
And again we're trying to find ways to push things forward at Coin Crew Games before our next big update. We can't wait to play Escape from Anti-Escape Island and we all hope you keep an eye out for all the new puzzles.
Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island will be available on PS4 and PS5 on November 10, 2022.