The indie cult hit's open-ended puzzles drove players to adore the game, but that's not the only advantage of that design choice, writes lead designer Zach Barth, in a new Gamasutra postmortem.
June 13, 2012
The indie cult hit's open-ended puzzles drove players to adore the game, but that's not the only advantage of that design choice, writes lead designer Zach Barth in a new Gamasutra postmortem. "Although we made a lot of questionable development decisions, the game's open-ended puzzles are unquestionably the biggest thing we did right; without them, SpaceChem would not be SpaceChem!" writes Barth. The IGF-nominated game, which has a strong cult following (read an older Gamasutra feature by Margaret Robertson to find out why) lets players solve puzzles however they like. "The standard gameplay 'formula' for SpaceChem is to give the player a set of tools (instructions and reactors), a challenge with a clear end condition (create molecules X, Y, and Z), and an empty area in which to create a solution," writes Barth. "Because of this, we were able to design almost all of the puzzles without knowing how they might be solved, focusing instead on making sure that each challenge was logically unique and could not be solved by repeating a previous solution." While this open-ended design style was a hit with the game's fans, it also had an upside with the design team, too. "In some ways this makes puzzle design easier, as it avoids the chicken-and-egg problems that arise when designing a puzzle and its solution simultaneously," Barth writes. Barth does admit that some players find this style of play "intimidating", yet others find it "intensely rewarding and discover a sense of ownership in their solutions not found in other games," he writes. To find out more of what went right and wrong in the development and release of SpaceChem, read Gamasutra's latest feature, a postmortem of the game.
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