Styx Revisited
Overview
Engine: Unity
Game: Styx Genre: 2D puzzle sidescroller Development Time: 28 Hours Design Goals
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Styx is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle game about leading souls through the realm of Styx and into the afterlife. Each level provides a new soul for the dark ferryman Kharr to guide to his master Hades. Each new soul brought into Styx reshapes the landscape. Evil souls make Styx dark and desolate; however, evil souls are easy to guide through Styx since the underworld is full of evil. Kharr’s challenge is guiding lighter souls to Styx. These souls make the realm lighter and full of more life; however, it is much more challenging for Kharr.
“Styx Revisited” features a level from Styx created a year after the game’s release. This level attempts to teach and introduce new players to Styx in a better why than the original game’s tutorial. The level features six puzzles each growing in difficulty. The first three puzzles teach players how to use the game’s mechanics while the last three reinforce these mechanics but provide some moderate difficulty to the player. This project took approximately 24 hours to complete. |
Level Layout
Puzzle 1
- Teach the player how to place the Shadow Charge mechanic
- Teach the player that they can only have three Shadow Charges exist at one time and how remove their old Shadow Charges
- Provide a safe challenge that allows the player to learn how the Shadow Charge mechanic
- Introduce the checkpoint language
- Uses the dark aesthetic style with silhouettes of knives, guns, and dead foliage
Puzzle 2
- Introduce challenge and death to the player
- Player must use what they learned in the previous puzzle to avoid the hazards
- If the player dies, it shows them how the checkpoints work
- Introduction to death is non-frustrating
- Teaches the player how to use the Shadow Force and provide a safe area to figure out how the mechanics work
- Uses the dark aesthetic style with silhouettes of knives, guns, syringes, and dead foliage
Puzzle 3
- Introduce a new type of hazard, which is a movable hazard
- Player learns how to use the Fiend Shout ability through tutorial text
- Movable enemy is scripted to intercept the AI and the player must use their new ability to avoid them
- Uses the dark aesthetic style with silhouettes of knives, guns, syringes, and dead foliage
Puzzle 4
- End of tutorial
- Introduces a bit more challenge to reinforce the game's mechanics
- Give the opportunity to the player to solve the challenge before allowing the AI to continue
- Aesthetic changes to have more white light and silhouettes of living foliage
Puzzle 5
- Two-step challenge puzzle
- Player must learn to use the platforms in the environment to get the AI stuck in a 'safe zone'
- Requires the use of at least the Shadow Charge and Shadow Force abilities
Puzzle 6
- More challenging two-part puzzle
- Player must use the safe-zone they created in the first part in order to set up the second part
- Requires the player to use at least their Shadow Force and Shadow Charge ability
Level layout info
Postmortem
What Went Well
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What Went Wrong
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What I Learned
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