To my horror I recently made a discovery about the game I've been creating - in a best case scenario I only have 2 - 5 hours of potential original gameplay to offer! That's not including replay time if they find it really fun, but still...

The game is a puzzle / arcade combo in which the player must unscramble a puzzle while avoiding the enemies that are chasing them. In my tests the game is pretty fun, there's just not enough of it! I think it might be the puzzle / arcade combo that's throwing me off because I haven't found many (well, any) games that are like this.

In a puzzle game you add gameplay hours by adding more puzzles and an editor or downloadable content so your game has potentially unlimited replay. In my case the only way to increase or change the difficulty of the puzzle itself is to make it bigger with more pieces. This quickly reaches a point where the computer overhead is just too much. I seem to be stuck at 10 difficulty levels as far as the size of the puzzle is concerned. This puts me in a scenario like Tetris where the core of the game is always the same it just gets harder and I don't know how fun that really is in the long term. I doesn't seem like enough to me.

In an arcade game the point is to destroy all the enemies / collect all objectives to complete a level. The levels are usually the same (Pacman) with the speed and frequency of enemies increasing. Right now I have 2 enemy unit types to chase the player but destroying them doesn't complete the level - only solving the puzzle does. Increasing the frequency and speed of enemies won't change the fact that it's basically the same puzzle over and over again.

*sigh* I'm kind of stuck here as I don't really have any ideas of how to give the user more play value for their money. The nature of the puzzle is always the same (like Tetris) so there's no editor or downloadable content that could be provided. I could ramp up the difficulty and force the player to complete more puzzles to win but I'm worried about it wearing thin.

I guess I'm asking if anyone knows of any games that have mixed puzzle and arcade elements really well - and provide lots of hours of gameplay. Also if anyone has ideas on how I could go about squeezing more out of my game...I'd love to hear ideas.

Thanks!

surely different enemy unit types would help. People will be dissapointed by just 2, even if the point of the game isnt to kill them. I would aim to have at least 8 different types, even if the differences are small and even maybe just cosmetic (different sounds and graphcis for the later enemies).
Sounds a good game.

Adding other units sounds good. I think you could also give a try to increasing the number of ways the players can get rid of these chasing units. So, although the puzzle and units are the same, the player can get additional gameplay value by overcoming his chasers using one way, or another, or that special way, or that very hard and tricky but really fun way...

How about a two player option where you have to compete against a friend or maybe even a computer opponent. The screen could be split down the middle and each player has to complete their puzzle first??

If you did a two player mode it could be similar to bust-a-move in the way that when you clear certain parts of your puzzle it throws all the enemies from your screen onto the other players screen and vice versa.

Thanks for the help!

I'm going to go ahead and try adding more enemy units and I might play with the level progession a bit. I have a 2 player mode planned but originally it was alternating - I'll see how the simultaneous play might work. Thanks again!

I'm no pro game designer or shareware marketer, but I did have a similar experience to you and came up with what I think is a workable solution.

Back in the old days before Steve was getting 100 game submissions a week, he had more time to putz around and evaluate games. I had read a publisher review of dexterity on "Thinlineofsanity.com". It perked my interest and I went and read all of Steve’s articles. I decided to try my hand at a puzzle game.

My first attempt was a very bejewled/tetris like game. It involved little veggie guys marching down a platform towards some water slides, if they went down a slide by themselves it took them a while to work up the courage, but if they had a few friends in line the would all go together. The object was to arrange the veggies into lines of similar veggies so that they would exit the platform in an efficient manner and give you lots of points. If a line filled up the game was over.

I made a little prototype of this game and sent it to Steve. The feedback he gave me is now old news around these parts, but it was new to me. He told me "this is a fun game but the biggest problem with it is that it will be difficult to sell", "the customer pays for the difference between the demo and full versions and there's not much you can add or take away from this game to convince people to buy it". He was right, the game was better suited as an msgaming zone, or yahoogames type distribution.

So I went back to the drawing board and started talking to a friend of mine who is now the designer/producer at Rainfall Studios.
Two of the things we came up with were to add story elements between levels to give the levels some context. We still want game play that stands on it's own merits, but some story mixed in between only adds to the immersion and it allows us to have a mini climax at the end of the shareware demo to get people hooked.

The other idea we had was to include multiple settings, a forest, a snowy mountain, rooftops in a town... etc. People would be able to see these settings in the demo but not play them. We wanted the story and the new settings to clearly identify what the player would be getting in the full version to motivate them to buy. We also have an item system with 5 items that interact to perform different actions, we haven't decided how many of the items to include in the demo yet. The end result however is giving the player a taste of what they can expect of the full version and actually being able to show them in the demo all the great stuff the full version contains without allowing them to experience it. Hopefully this will present the player with a situation where it's easy to give into a quick impulse buy.