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Empress of China is Jeroen_Sol's and my submission to the "Swap in the Middle with You" event. The first part of the game was done by Jeroen_Sol, and the second half by me. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned for me, so my half is rather lacking.

Empress of China is two stories: it is the story of a girl named Lei, her two fathers, and her favorite book. It is also the story of a Chinese princess named Xiaoli, her servant Zhong, and her evil brother Jiang. But despite their obvious differences, the two stories are more similar than they seem...

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Difficulty problems and possible solutions

It's come to my attention that this game in its current state is... shall we put it... way too hard and frustrating to be enjoyable for anyone who isn't both a hardcore puzzle fan and a masochist.

Though difficulty is something I was definitely going for, and not something I want to remove from the game, some of the puzzles (in particular the Path of Light ones) suffer from a lack of visibility and direction. I definitely want to fix those issues by adding a few easy Path of Light puzzles before the first one, and adding a map into each room where you can't see the entirety of the puzzle in one go. That should already help a lot.

But those aren't the only thing my puzzles suffer from. They are also just generally difficult to such a level that they are too frustrating to appeal.

I've been toying with several ideas on how to make the game less frustrating, without making it much more easy.

One possibility I thought up (and Liberty also came up with the same idea in her stream), is to add an optional hint system that will propose to help you solve the current puzzle after failing it five times. (breaking a boulder in the boulder pushing puzzles, ruling out certain entry paths in the path of light puzzles, adding another word in the word puzzles, allowing you to get hit once or twice without failing in the spike puzzles)

Another possibility would be moving the switches that advance the plot one or two puzzles forwards, leaving the 4th (and maybe the 3rd) puzzles as optional, really difficult puzzles that net some sort of reward but aren't required to beat the game.

I feel doing both might be handholding too much, but I'm not sure which of the two I want to go with.

Any suggestions or other ideas would be awesome!

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I'm glad that you didn't take my crit too hard. To be fair, while they were quite difficult, it felt good when I did overcome them on my own - but there's a bit of a difference between difficult and impossibubble. ^.^;

Oh, and the stream itself is up on my youtube if you wanted to check it out. I've added time stamps so you can just jump to the game in the video (it was the last one I played and I'll probably finish it off during tonight's stream in... about an hour or so.)
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I played this, and really liked it. It's a decent puzzle game, with most of the flaws due to its short dev time, but mostly I'm surprised that so much gameplay is packed into a game made where most of it was made in a week. Good puzzle design, difficult yet not impossible. We need more like dis. Good job, Jeroen and Someoneman.
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