Created for our exam project, Alien Exterminator. The access panels control the ship’s reactors but they’re malfunctioning, so pressing one of the buttons also toggles one of the others, in the vein of Lights Out. The player has to find a way to manipulate the buttons to match the indicated pattern. After our team tested an analog prototype of this puzzle, I modeled the access panels, programmed the puzzle logic, and implemented the puzzles in the game.
You can play Alien Exterminator on itch.io.
The puzzles are the main drivers of gameplay in Alien Exterminator. Each phase of the game is locked away behind one of these button puzzles, so it was important that the player could easily identify the puzzle and their mechanic. Displaying the success state of the puzzle immediately next to it makes clear that the challenge isn’t in figuring out the password, but rather in finding a button sequence that will produce the password pattern.
To teach the player what they’re supposed to to, the first instance of the puzzle contains no connected buttons—the player can simply enter the code and open the door. From there the access panels start to malfunction, introducing the actual puzzle mechanic that the player has to interact with for the rest of the game.
We realized too late in our final round of playtesting that though people went about solving the puzzle very methodically in our analog playtests, in the digital version players would simply rapidly click buttons at random to end up at the correct pattern. This obviously seemed to be a more efficient way to solve the puzzle than actually thinking it through. Rather than introduce more complexity to the puzzle, I think this could largely have been addressed through diegetic means such as delays, flickering, etc. on the toggling of connected buttons to stress the connection.
NMBJ 