The Importance of Design

Welcome back readers!

This week I’ve officially started my new team project……A 3D Escape Room Game! The theme is going to be four horseman of the apocalypse and I get to design the famine room! As most of us probably know, the first step in any new software development project is the design step, which is what this week’s blog just happens to be about.

Design can be thought of in two parts for software development:

The back-end – how the software will use and store its data

The front-end – what your users see and interact with

Both parts of the design need to work in harmony, especially in a video game. For this project we also have a third kind of design to worry about, puzzle design. This week we are all working on visual and puzzle design of our various rooms. So, let me talk a little about the design I’m working on.

For my famine themed room, the overall design will be a kitchen. I got the idea to use a kitchen from my lovely wife when I was stuck trying to come up with a design theme and thought that it was brilliant, so I went with it. As a side note, always listen to your significant other. The hard thing now is coming up with puzzles that use the theme. I thought of one involving a hidden safe in the freezer that gets revealed by another puzzle. The clues need to be somewhat obvious so that the player doesn’t get stuck yet hidden enough to be a challenge or it’s boring. Another puzzle I thought of involves using the decorations around the room to find specific hidden objects, but it might be a bit too cryptic. So far, this project has reinforced that video game design is kind of hard and a big balancing act.

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for my next post!