Mini-Postmortem: Causality - Classic Puzzle Game Reimagined

About The Game

"Causality - Classic Puzzle Game Reimagined" is a modern remake of the classic puzzle game, "Lights Out". For the uninformed, in the original game, given a board, usually a 5x5 grid, some grids are lighted up while others are unlit. Pressing a grid would toggle its light state on or off and at the same time toggle the adjacent grids' light state. The objective is to toggle all the grids into the "unlit" state. In Causality, the base gameplay of toggling "grids" (or "tiles" in Causality) is the same, while the objective has changed to "toggle all the tiles into the same color". The following states what differs Causality from Lights Out

• Causality is stage based
• Each stage has the tiles arranged in various shapes instead of a sqaure grid as per Lights Out
• Causality currently has a total of 240 stages, split into 8 chapters. Each chapter beyond the first introduces a new mechanic, or "special tile" that changes up how the tiles affects one another.
• 5 special tiles will be introduced throughout the course of the game. (The last two chapters consist of "Challenge" stages of higher difficulty instead of introducing new mechanics)
• All 240 stages are hand-designed rather than being randomly generated

About Unexpect3rd Developments

"Unexpect3rd" is a moniker that I, Edmund Ching goes by when identifying myself with the games I make. By "games I make", I do mean games that were designed and developed solely by me. Why I would highlight this is because I do have a day-job as a game developer for a game studio. I am most fortunate to have bosses who understand my circumstances and allowed me to work on and release my own games (outside of working hours, of course). As such I would also take care not to have any of my own games overlap or conflict against the games that are produce by my employing company. I have worked on multiple mobile titles for 3 different start up game studios in Singapore over the past 4 years. Each of these studios has at least one hit game on either the App Store or Facebook. As for my own games, I have previously released two other games onto the Apple App Store, Causality is the third game released to the public.

What Went Right

Reducing Difficulty

Aside from other attributes and variables, the most visible attribute that would define the difficulty of a stage in Causality is the "Minimal Required Move". Players are not forced to meet the minimum move in order to clear a stage, stages can be cleared as long as all the tiles can be toggled into the same color. Each chapter would always start off with a few stages of "Min. Move 1" to allow the players to get the hang of anything new being introduce in that chapter, before stages progress to require increasing number of moves as the minimal move count. 

During alpha, I had 3 chapters (base mechanic plus 2 introduced mechanics) worth of stages designed before I showed it to people around me for play testing. At that point the highest difficulty each chapter would have would run up to "Min. Move 8". At this level of difficulty, even those with minimum move 6 or 7, playtesters found the game to have reached "frustrating hard". On the design side, these levels also posed problems as I had trouble trouble testing for alternative solutions that actually uses lesser than the intended minimal moves, due to the increased complexity of those stages.

I redesigned those 90 stages and decided to stick to a chapter's highest difficulty at "Min. Move 6". Even amongst the 30 stages of a chapter, only the last 2 stages are of "Min. Move 6". This freed up more slots for me to have stages of lower difficulty which consequently added a greater amount of positive experience for the players. Players have more stages at the beginning of each chapter to understand the new mechanics, and many would experience the "joy" of breezing through a good number of stages before encountering something relatively more challenging in the second half of the chapter. Around minimal moves of 4-5, the stages have been feedback as challenging rather than frustrating, thus somewhat proving the experience turned from negative to positve.

Visual Style Iteration

My disclaimer here is that I have no background nor training in graphics design. Designing the visuals for any of my games had always been a long and tedious challenge, many times more so than actually coding the game. My initial look-and-feel for Causality was based off saturated contrasting colors as you can see from the following image (which was my very first mock up for Causality) and video.

If anything, from the video you can tell I really needed a lesson on color theory. I also went through many iterations on the tile designs.

Without much design experience, my alternative source of idea will be referencing other games. I began downloading and referencing games that uses such styles. 

Taking cue from the referenced games, wanting to be minimalistic, I cleaned out as many components from my in game screen as possible, cut out texts and went for the "flat" look with the tiles. Overall I achieved a rather flat and clean look which resounded positively from most players (or at least all of those who provided me with feedback either through the forums, social media or store reviews). 

Personally, I have the urge to further tweak the visuals to make it look slightly more polished, because it feels like the "clean flat" look I got is treading very close to "lazy amatuer programmer art", which in a way, is still true.

Complimenting Sounds

This was as hard as I had imagined. I had always wanted this game to be played relaxingly. There was no countdown timers, no combo meters whatsoever, I wanted the players to enjoy the game at their own pace. To compliment that "feel" and to stay true to being "minimalistic", I decided to not have a looping background music and instead let the sound effects of a tapped tile reverberate into ambience. To my ears, acoustics sounded the least aggressive or peircing and weirdly therapatic when reverberating. The way I designed the sound was more of "What I like" than what it should be, but surprisingly (or not), I was not the only one who appreciates that and the sounds was well received most of the players.

What Went Wrong

Editor Not Fully Functioning

It is almost common sense that when developing a stage based puzzle game, one should always have a level editor. With hundreds of levels, an editor would greatly speed up the churning out of stages. Unfortunately, the stage editor I had was missing crucial functions that was supposed to speed things up. My stage editor allowed me to design stages as per expectation: placing tiles, setting colors, setting special tiles, playtesting, etc. It was however missing a data output function. Having designed the data I/O  in the game without thoughts of a editor first landed me with much technical difficulty when implementing the editor. Then, rather than overcoming this difficulty, I chose to jump straight into designing stages with what I had. This shortsightedness resulted in the following work flow:

1. Design a stage using the editor
2. Playtest it in the editor
3. Write down the stage layout and solution coordinates in a notebook (above-right pic)
4. Repeat steps 1-3 until X chapters are filled up
5. Manually entering the noted-down stage data into the data file
6. Play through all the stages to ensure correctness
7. Go back to step 1 and repeat until 240 stages are completed
8. Play through every stage again to ensure correctness

Without the data output function of the editor, steps 3 and 5 resulted in plenty of human errors in addition to a much slower overall design speed. It was a very painful procedure, and i deserved the pain for my laziness.

Naming Without Researching

If you had watched the video above, you would notice the game was originally titled "Singularity". That title was loosely based on the effect that the objective of each stage was to turn all tiles into the same color, a single color. At the eleventh hour, I decided to change the title to "Causality - Classic Puzzle Game Reimagined" instead. Firstly, I thought "Causality" fits the theme better, as each cause (tapping a tile) would result in an effect that would affect others. Cause and effects! Secondly, I thought having a few more generic descriptive gaming terms in the title would help with SEO. Oh boy how wrong I was. I did no research beyond my understanding of the word and submitted the game with it's current title.