Features from Feedback
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
After showing INDIGO to a handful of publishers and a few hundred people at PAX, I received a whole heap of feedback. Most of it was positive, which is always nice to hear, but the most useful feedback was constructive. In many cases it wasn't even something people said directly to me, it was something I observed while watching them play.
In INDIGO, players need to sample elements from the environment and then use them as ammunition for the G.E.A.R. gun. During one publisher playthrough, I watched someone struggle to find a water puddle needed to solve a puzzle. Afterwards, he told me it wasn't obvious enough.
My first reaction was, "Really?" To me, it's a concrete floor with almost nothing on it except this puddle. There are visual effects dripping into it, sound effects, and even splashy footsteps when you walk through it. There is a sign on the wall saying "Sample water with the gun" right above the puddle. In my head I was thinking, "Without a giant neon arrow, I'm not sure I could make it any more obvious."
But that's the danger of being the developer. I already know the solution.
Feedback from one person isn't always something I'll immediately act on unless I agree with it. Then came PAX.
I started noticing that while most people eventually found the puddle, they often had to stop and really look for it. That became a concern. The environments in the demo are relatively sparse, so what happens later when rooms are packed with cables, pipes and props? If players are struggling to spot a puddle now, how will they fare in a much busier environment?
The answer I came up with was a scan feature. Plenty of games use this kind of mechanic. Death Stranding and The Last of Us immediately come to mind.
I had deliberately put this feature off because I have an entire game to make and wanted to focus on building a playable version of INDIGO first. The problem is that I have my writing partner, Jono, play-testing levels as I make them. You only get one first time solving a puzzle, so I needed to implement the scan now to understand how this powerful tool would affect puzzle viability and difficulty. So I got to work.
To my surprise, the prototype was fully working within a day and already looked pretty good. I may not change much more about it.
The scan sends out a pulse and briefly highlights relevant objects. I initially started working on a fancy post-processing effect for the pulse, but I struggled to get the timing and look I was after. So I abandoned that approach and did it in a cheap and nasty way instead. It turns out sometimes the simple solution is the best one. The pulse is literally just a sphere mesh with flipped faces and a material applied to it. The sphere spawns, scales up and fades out. Very simple.
It still felt a little raw, so I added some little beep and boop sounds whenever an object is highlighted. It's amazing how much difference a bit of audio can make. Suddenly it felt less like a prototype I had whipped up that morning and more like a proper feature.
The next issue was that the scan could only highlight objects containing a mesh. Ironically, the very thing that started all of this, the water puddle, isn't made up of a mesh at all. It's a combination of decals and particle effects.
To solve this, I added a small UI popup that displays what something is alongside a little icon. It looked great at first, but then I tested it in a room full of objects and suddenly I had fifteen UI popups appearing at once. It was a complete overload of information. I eventually settled on a compromise. UI popups only appear for elements that can be sampled, Fire, Water and Electricity, and for objects whose state has been altered by an element, such as metal that has been heated up or electrified.
I have a feeling this scan is going to become one of the player's core tools. It's already hard to imagine the game without it.
At the end of the day, this feature has been a good reminder that as developers we can become attached to our vision and resist quality-of-life features because we want players to observe more closely or explore more thoroughly. But players will always play the game their own way. If something is creating friction without adding meaningful challenge, it's usually better to embrace a solution that respects the player's time while staying true to the experience you're trying to create.
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