From Puzzles to Scenes
Another example: a complex puzzle where the player needed to find two steam valves and place them in their correct places and use them, became a simple situation in which the player just needed to interact with a valve in order to lower the level of water of a tunnel and pass through. Of course, some zombies would try to grab him as he passes.
This "puzzle" became more of a "scene" -- something that the player experiences and not something that the player has to do. But this worked. It really worked for most of the players. They were engaged while playing through this scene.
And so, we kept transforming all of the puzzles we had. Then is when we stopped calling them "puzzles" and started to call them "gameplay situations" or just "scenes."
Some of them became so simple that, in the end, the player only needed to run forward, to press a button, to find a hidden spot in a room, or even just to jump over a zombie.
My favorite example is the scene where Randall finds the fireman's axe. It's extremely simple, but I could see the satisfaction face in every player as they get stuck in the fence -- maybe for five or six seconds -- and then realize that there is a fireman's axe stuck on a body. They grab it, watch Randall's animation, and then use it to break the lock of the fence and advance.
It's simple, it's easy to solve -- but it's rewarding. And the player feels smart.
The fireman's axe scene
And so we started to create these scenes, all through the game, exploiting the game systems we already had and adding different elements to each level to keep the game interesting and to create variations.
If a level had a helicopter, we had to create puzzles using the helicopter; if a level had traps, we had to use the traps. And so on.
Conclusions
We learned the path from the "depth of mechanics" to the "width of mechanics" the hard way. We reduced the complexity of the puzzles, but we increased the variety of them.
This is the approach that games such as Limbo or Amnesia take. Actually, Frictional Games' Thomas Grip has posted about this issue.
As old school players, we tend to look for games such as Braid or Monkey Island, which try to challenge players. But the kind of immersive, cinematic experience we wanted to deliver fitted better with the other approach -- and classics such as Another World and Prince of Persia did so, too, so it's not as if we're straying from our roots after all.
Deadlight got a 69 on Metacritic. We know that there are many things that we could have done better, but I believe that the overall "puzzle" experience has been positive for the players.
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Absolutely. Super Metroid was one of our references, but to create a game like this, you need to make this core not only to the level, but to the game design.
Just to mention two key features: new skills you are learning now and then, and easy to spawn, varied, enemies that fight with nice patterns and that create interesting combinations.
At some point of the development we haven't implemented yet these features, but we needed to keep building levels if we wanted to meet the deadlines.
So we built them with the "tools" we had at that moment. It's a nonsense to build levels assuming that you will have core features "in the future".
With the tools we have, we only could create a linear-one way experience, so we focused on that.
I'd argue that Braid and Monkey Island are just as immersive as more cinematic games. If the player is expecting a cinematic experience, and runs into challenging puzzles (as you wrote about), that immersion is lost. Similarly, if you were playing Braid and ran into a bunch of cut scenes and heavily scripted events, the immersion would be lost, too. Perhaps priming in the early stages of the game is essential to communicate to the players what to expect from the rest of the game.
I guess that achieving "immersion" is always one of the goals of any game designer, in any case.
With Deadlight, however, we also wanted to craft a "cinematic" experience, and for that, variety seemed to be more important that depth.
I applaud the team not only on the design decisions, which I agree made the game a better one, but also on the production decisions that allowed the game to ship on time. Scraping a feature that isn't core to the experience, and instead embracing the available systems to create content - this should be mantra among game devs.
How important and sadly sometimes undervalued is playtesting!