A Boomer's Jigsaw

It's like that one Jigsaw movie, but like instead of a scary dude trapping you it's an angry boomer. A custom level for the VVVVVV: Make and Play Edition

Design Statement:

Beginning the process of designing my VVVVVV level, I right from the start did not want my map to be a 20 room obstacle course because personally as a player, those are not the kind of games I enjoy playing. And since a hard level was off the table, the next most obvious answer was to make a narrative game. During this process I went back and thought about what kind of narrative games I enjoy, and what would seem feasible to make with the affordances I was given. I ultimately decided that with use of terminals and dialogue boxes, it might be a good idea to make a comedy narrative. I actually drew a lot of ideas for the plot from just thinking of room puzzle ideas. The thought of gameplay in the game led my mind to think about Saw, a movie about a man offering his "guests" to escape if they can solve his puzzles. And to add in the flavor of comedy, I thought it would be funny to make the antagonist a baby boomer and revolve the plot around his nonexistant war with milennials balanced around this Saw-ish theme. 

So now that the idea was baked, All there was left was execution. I needed to find a way to weave this narrative with some sort of gameplay that would still be engaging. I found creative ways at redesigning puzzle ideas from common VVVVVV levels and rebranding them with a baby boomer vision in mind. I think the gameplay I ended up on in the end was a good trade off of not boring, but not frustrating which was the vision I had in mind when creating the game.

One thing that I didn't think thouroughly enough through before settling on this project was that there would be a big chunk of scripting and narrative writing. I dedicated one of my day's to just writing at the  Korean War Veteran's Memorial listening to Diamond City Radio to get me in the correct headspace to play the part. I also had to get very familiar with the Make and Play Scripting tool which was a struggle at first, because of limited documentation, but I think by the end of the game I was able to fly through the scripts.