![]() What played as an escape room puzzle at the beginning, is now turning into a cockpit simulation game. This creates an entanglement between very distinct mechanics that is not immediately obvious, but it will become more apparent once the player has figured out how to turn on the engine and move the machine around. What is happening is that as the player understands this ancient and mysterious machine, new gameplay elements are about to emerge. ![]() Rather, it's the emerging restriction of another gameplay mechanic that is progressively surfacing. The idea of not stopping the game when a puzzle is solved is not a stylistic choice here, nor a deliberate artistic stance on unconventional game design practices. The result of switching on the machine is indeed that the machine is now running, and the fact that nothing else happens to break this immersive moment can be rather unsettling, but hopefully just as intriguing. But there won’t be any pause, cutscene, high-score result or anything that makes it clear that the player is now moving to puzzle number two. To be more precise, the result of figuring out how to turn on the machine will actually feel very rewarding, as the whole cockpit will come to life all of a sudden. The game does not stop to tell the player whether he has accomplished something or not. Nauticrawl does indeed start as an escape room, but as soon as the player solves the first puzzle, which is about turning on the machine, something rather unconventional happens. Unblocking, fully immersive, very unsettling puzzles It probably would have made for a cool spin-off of The Room, but my desire with this game was to experiment further. Nauticrawl could have been just that: a game about pressing all the buttons and figuring each puzzle in a chain of progressively unlocked and increasingly difficult stages. Admittedly, this is the ideal premise for an escape room type of game - nothing much in the way of curiosity and the urge to fiddle with everything that can be touched. The game won’t bother with details about why you’re trying to escape, or where you’re coming from, not even where you’re supposed to go. Flavored with just a bit of lore, this is literally the only thing the game will explicitly narrate before you’re thrown inside a cockpit full of buttons, levers, and gauges. Nauticrawl is an atmospheric game with a very simple premise: you’re attempting a desperate escape, and stealing a mysterious machine is your only way out. ![]() What: Evoking mystery and wonder through puzzle game design I will list some of the ingredients that are part of this weird recipe, how they interact with one another in a precarious balance, and I’ll try and sum it all up as an abstract formula that *maybe* could even be replicated to make different games. ![]() In this deep dive, I will go over how blending and layering different gameplay elements in a rather non-conventional way contributed to shaping the unique experience that is Nauticrawl. However, the start of my journey in this industry dates further back with designing and pixelating adventure games on the Game Boy Color. Some years before that, I worked at Lionhead Studios. Hello! My name is Andrea Interguglielmi and I’m the developer/artist behind the mysteriously intricate game, Nauticrawl.īefore finding myself back in full time indie game development, I took a long detour through the movie industry, working as a VFX tools dev and technical director. Who: Game developer Andrea Interguglielmi Check out earlier installments, including building an adaptive tech tree in Dawn of Man, achieving seamless branching in Watch Dogs 2 ’s Invasion of Privacy missions, and creating the intricate level design of Dishonored 2 's Clockwork Mansion.
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