Avoiding claustrophobia

After testing the game for some days, the problem arose that it was quite claustrophobic, in the sense that's mentioned on this article in the great site Electron Dance.

So I started thinking about how to keep the sliding and rotating mechanics, without having to push actuators around Sokoban-style, or repeat the solution from the previous game (which used fixed movement types for each platform). I decided to use the normal controls for sliding, and add a specific control for rotations.

And voilà, now the player can slide or rotate all platforms! This offers much more freedom and reduce the claustrophobia sensation a lot. So far so good.

But alas, this introduced the classic problem of raising the possible complexity of the puzzles, so I decided to put a limit to the use of each platform, in order to limit the maximum number of possible movements.

Visually, this is represented with the platforms wearing a little with each movement, until they crumble and fall. In the video you can see the first iteration of the visuals.

This change makes the game much more cerebral and less trial-and-error-prone (I hope). I think it looks very promising, although of course I'll need to test it a lot.