Tri-Again

• Create a game around a single core mechanic, and two secondary mechanics

• Show, Don’t Tell: introducing the game’s mechanics without explicit text instructions.
• Challenging Puzzles: making each level noticeably harder as the game progresses, by introduction additional mechanics.
• Clarity: making it obvious to the player how their actions affected gameplay and progression.

The start screen acted as a tutorial to our game. The player had to click and drag the green triangle from the bottom, into the empty side beside start to continue. We thought this way, the player would learn the main function of the game without the need to have a text explanation. It went well during testing, as all our players figured it out right away.

While we were able to tutorialize the main mechanic well, a failure we had was properly introducing the rotation mechanic to the players. We only had a simple diagram explaining rotation to the player, and it was not obvious to most who played the game. Additionally, the rotation was introduced in a level that was too difficult, making it hard for players to understand.

Instead, we should have introduced the mechanic slowly, requiring one simple rotation to pass, just to safely teach them the mechanic. Additionally, we could have introduced the limit to rotations later as well to test and challenge players.

One mistake we made early on was forgetting to think from a new player's perspective. When it came time to arrange the puzzles in order of difficulty, we wanted difficulty to scale with each level. However we underestimated how hard the levels were, because to us we understood each mechanics without being taught. During our first playtest, players all had a hard time in one of the early levels because we introduced multiple rotations too quickly before properly introducing the rotation mechanic.

One lesson we learned early on through testing was we needed to make it obvious to the player how they failed. Initially, we thought players would be able to tell when their shapes were out of line, but sometimes it was too ambiguous and left players feeling frustrated. To fix this, we made it so that any shape that fell outside the outline would turn red, making it obvious to the player which exact shape was the issue.

Additionally, on the fail state I tried to highlight the redo button, making it obvious that this is how players restart levels. Since we focused on trying to tutorialize without words, this was done to further help players who may not have noticed the button.