Hello everyone!
How has week 1 of Rhell been treating you? Has it been difficult? Easy? Any puzzles got you stumped? Let us know!
This week on Rune Records, we asked Alice - What were your inspirations for the game?
As everyone who has seen Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times can guess, a HUUUUGE inspiration for me, was the game Scribblenauts! If you're unfamiliar, Scribblenauts was a puzzle game where you could write any word in a book to create it, and then use those creations to solve puzzles. I played so much of the game as a kid and really admired how open the games systems were and how you could solve puzzles in a bunch of different ways.
When planning Rhell, I wanted to get this same experience - instead of figuring out a puzzle I wanted players to see a puzzle and think ‘oh, I bet I could do this!’ and then be able to do whatever they thought of!
Another big inspiration for me was the game Baba Is You. It is the game I personally have put the most time into, and what always appealed to me about Baba Is You is the amount of complexity in the game's systems! It felt like new mechanics were always being added, but what was more interesting was that each new mechanic worked with older mechanics from earlier parts of the game. Usually, I feel when games introduce mechanics they tend to forget or stop using older ones, but I admired how Baba Is You kept coming back to and using its early game mechanics with its late game mechanics.
Which is definitely something I wanted to capture in Rhell! So when designing Rhell, I tried to make sure that each rune was not just fun and unique on its own. Whenever I would design a new rune, I would consider how this could combine or be used with every other rune in game, and if I couldn't think of a satisfying enough combination with other runes, I would hard code a fully unique interaction to happen!
An example of this is the REMOVE rune and the LIFE rune. When combined together, early on in development it would essentially do nothing as it made something come to life and then instantly be destroyed. So, I instead made it so that combining these two runes essentially creates a third new rune called INTANGIBLE! Adding in a new unique effect when relevant helps to keep Rhell interesting as players get to find new surprises whenever they get a new rune.
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I love the Intangible effect, it's so satisfying.
Community Spotlight Time!
You guys have been showing off some really cool stuff in the Discord so we'd like to highlight some of them in our weekly diaries!
First off, we have Discord user tinyoctopus202 completing the game super quick while picking up as few runes as possible, so impressive. My tiny brain could never.
Credits: tinyoctopus202 (Discord)
Another one from Discord user Skullywix, 'I'm not 100% sure, but I think I have mastered the game'. I think so too, Skullywix. I think so too.
Credits: skullywix (Discord)
Hey at least it's backed by the dev which means it's definitely legit. Silloki is on to something though.....
And last but not least, this beautiful meme by Trucidee on the steam forums
Credits: Trucidee (Steam Community)
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Well that's it for this week folks! I'll hold Alice hostage again this time next week just for you guys (for legal purposes this is a joke, IT'S A JOKE) I do hope you enjoy these weekly dev diaries and insights into the dev's mind! (please say yes I need this job)