A new type puzzle game COLLOC Dev Blog #1

1. The Birth of Colloc

Colloc was called Fission when the idea(a low poly puzzle game) of the game first came out. Maybe inspired by some random elements in my life, I started wondering what a puzzle game would be like if its unit have fissioning and merging mechanisms.

The game logo of Fisson:

But thought it over and over, I discovered that if I design the game like this, it would finally become a number game similar to sudoku, and doesn't have much puzzles to dig and mining. I don't want that, so another idea came out, That is concretization.

Because of the cognitions of human are diverse. If you wanna enrich the puzzles and gameplay of the game, you can't only dig the fissioning and merging form of the puzzle itself, you should also look for some specific and interesting things in our daily life. And convert those things into the game, combining them to the puzzles. And then we can use what player already know to make the puzzles more rich and challenging.

For example, if we wanna use a lifting structure or make our unit sliding in an abstract geometric game, we should do a lot of works to teach and make players understanding the system and elements. But the type of the puzzles in game Fission seems not suitable for abstract expression. So I decide to make a new game using same fissioning and merging mechanisms and a concretized design. And there is Colloc.

The image and logo of Colloc:

From the image above, we can find out that this is the same puzzle as the one in Fission logo.

2.Puzzle

Since the BLACKHOLE NO.24 came, the colloc world lost its color. As the color elf, every colloc has their own different energy, they can fission and merge, and use their energy to restore the tile that lost their color. That's all the mechanisms of colloc in this puzzle game. I tried my best to make the mechanisms as simple as possible. If not, the puzzles will feel cumbersome but not profound, and it will lose a lot of interesting characteristics. And I also tried to weakening the number part, tried not to let players thinking about number too much. Because I want players to solve those puzzles more logically instead of counting or calculating.

Some gameplay of Colloc:

For guides, I made some levels to teach player how to play and how the system works instead of too many instructions and words and interruptions.

3.Diversity

In order to make the game more fun and make players feel novel, we should consider about diversity. We do can make more and more harder levels by digging the same mechanisms deeper and deeper. But without novelty, those levels would feel dull instead of challenging. I wanted to make the puzzles more fun to play and more things to explore, for those concerns diversity is a good choice. For example, I added some new elements in other chapter of Colloc, such as floating wood bridge, switches, snow and ice skating etc.. Those elements are familiar in our daily life, players can easily get how those elements work and use that to solve the puzzles.