Department X

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO RECEIVE POTENTIAL SPOILERS ON ANOMALIES.

Department X is the final (?) department of Anomalies. www.coolors.co has been been so wildly helpful in making the color palettes for Dept. B and X. So beautiful! Aside from a new character (Ms Yoke), I have a lot of work yet to do on Department X:

1. New RNE(s)
2. New gameplay mechanic?
3. Expansion on the lore

As short as that list is, all that stuff is way easier said than done.

New RNE(s)

It's gonna require a lot of brainstorming to figure out what new RNE(s) I want to add. Every RNE has to be fairly easy to understand and get the gist of quickly, but still be moderately challenging to keep the players' attention and keep them on their toes. The spinner, memory screen, and road RNEs are all quite simple, and I'm looking for something a little more complicated for Dept. X. Maybe I could even expand on existing RNEs, like adding a new mechanic to spinners that only exists in Dept. X? I'm intrigued! But RNEs for Dept. X are gonna take some figuring out.

New gameplay mechanic?

Honestly, I have no idea where to start on this one. Players love new game mechanics that switch up the flow or add complexity to empty parts of the game, but they can be so, so difficult to come up with and implement properly. I thought it would be a fun and thrilling idea to put a time limit of 7 seconds between finding each anomaly in Dept. B, but my playtester Benana trying it out in-game said it was "disheartening" and "discouraging". Suffice to say, the timer got canned. This shows just how important playtesting is! Had the discouragement not been called out to me, we would all have the timer today and it would be an awful experience for every player who hasn't played the game as much as I have (because of testing and that stuff). I need to focus some time on figuring out what the hell to put into Dept. X to keep it engaging and interesting; people like learning more than they say they do, ha-ha.

Expansion on the lore

I was thinking I could add more lore elements to the game like secret codes you can find with the numbers on the sides of the memory screen RNEs or stealing Foster's personal diary somehow. Every game is better than lore and it's something I haven't really played with before... It's gonna be a pain to code in, whatever it is, but it will hopefully lead to a more engaging player experience for a wider range of players— as of now, Anomalies is a game appealing most prominently to big nerds (maybe it's just that all my playtesters are big nerds) and lore could help bring in other types of players.

I plan to finish development on the game after making Department X and then looking over the whole rest of the game for things I can polish up and expand on, but perhaps I will choose to pursue new ideas within Anomalies and continue to expand the game past what will already exist. I've been having lots of fun so far!