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Game Design Project: Entry 5 - Engineering Puzzle Design

 Having engineering related puzzles in a game where you play as an engineer is a vital. But there need to be a balance between the complexity of the puzzles and the engaging aspects of it, since DungeoNeer is not being built as simulator game the puzzles need to be more fun than deep. This where the design process gets strenuous. 

The electrical engineering puzzle was easy to conceptualize as I was more familiar with it. One more aspect to this is that the players will have to deduce what's wrong with teh device themselves through a series of visual hints such as specific LED lights being off, flickering of lights, sparks flying etc. I'm going through my high school syllabus to learn more about how capacitors work in order to find a way to gamify this.




As an Computer Science engineer myself it was necessary to add a hacking or decryption related puzzle. I love the hacking mini game in Cyberpunk 2077, its easy enough to learn the basic concept and understand the rules but the puzzle can be scaled up to be more difficult as well. This is perfect example for recurring puzzle minigame design as this has a lower barrier for entry but the skill ceiling can be increased.

That's when I recalled Binary tree data structures and methods of inserting and searching a binary. The binary tree has 2 sub-paths and the left node is always smaller than the parent node and vice versa. The decryption puzzle was quickly conceptualized, here the player will be given a series of directions needed to reach a specific node, the players have to start from the root node and follow the directions to reach the destination. The destination node has the decrypted value which forms a single digit or alphabet of the password.

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