Based on a focus on Treasure Hunter at the end of Week 5 we added various design additions to the idea which was shaping up to be a dungeon adventure where players:

1. Could move around a character
2. Had an inventory (method of dealing with many gems in a level)
3. Could defeat monsters (requested by our audience)
4. Could pick up gem bags (method of incrementally introducing gems incrementally to our puzzles)

Features 1, and 2 were integrated into the following early prototype.

A New Perspective

We met with a designer from Zynga who was visiting The Entertainment Technology. She had a look at our idea, and advised us to focus on our core mechanic which was the slotting gems into the beam maker.

So based on the feedback we:

1. Removed gem bags.
2. Removed inventory.
3. Made our main character stationary. The character would now be an assistant who would act like guide (akin to Dora the Explorer games) giving advice, information and hints but not actually solving the puzzle directly.
4. Constrained problems to only 180 because the teacher requested it.
5. Finally created 10 levels at the end of the week.

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Simultaneously our artist continued to make aesthetic progress.