You are...

somewhere, it seems.

But you can't seem to know anything.

Who are you? How did you get there?

Maybe you should find out.

**Soulless**: a short adventure/puzzle map made by Dieuwt, for Vertext Mapjam 2020.
Use your ethereal powers to ignore walls... probably.
Use your fire sparks to ignite matter... surely.
Use your floating energy to lift off... maybe.

Don't push your luck.
This whole thing...
it might not be worth it.

*1.15.2, singleplayer.*

[SPOILERS AHEAD] for the whole thing! Don't read this until you've completed the map!

So, what I learned from this mapjam was actually quite a lot about puzzle maps, or puzzle games in general. Let me elaborate.

#DESIGN
Because of the limited time, I couldn't just throw out many complicated puzzles. So I tried to make every puzzle either introduce something slightly new, or do something interesting with all mechanics so far. Each world has 7 puzzles: at least 1 tutorial (to teach basics), 1 "ending" (to combine everything), and 1 boss (for wrapping it up). The rest either introduces a new tech/mechanic or requires you to understand everything so far. I could've done way more with beacons and swords too, or really any hard puzzle for that matter, but didn't want to distract from the ether too much. That is the main theme, and it should stay that way.

Essentially: 1 tutorial puzzle, 2 mechanical puzzles, 1 tricky puzzle, 2 mechanical puzzles, 1 boss to wrap it up. So the experience takes a while to complete but doesn't feel dragged out!

Matter.
#1 is a tutorial about ether/keys/water/reach
#2 is a new mechanic: chests
#3 is an expansion from reach: with water buckets
#4 is a trick: get the key from the house and backtrack
#5 is a new mechanic: 4 keys
#6 is an expansion from chests: key transferring
#7 is a boss battle, serves a lore purpose and introduces you to Heat.

Energy.
#1 is a tutorial about Heat and burning blocks
#2 is a new mechanic: going in water resets Heat
#3 is an expansion from water/heat: careful ordering of actions
#4 is an expansion from water/heat: clearing a path to burn the right blocks
#5 is a new mechanic: Campfires
#6 is a trick: put all in one chest and retrieve at once
#7 is a boss battle, grants Beacon powers, and just adds a little more mystery.

Space.
#1 is a tutorial about Beacons
#2 is a new mechanic: the Gravity Spell and its uses
#3 is a new mechanic: the Metal Spell, and it also pushes Beacons further
#4 is an expansion: using Heat in combination with Beacons
#5 is a trick: you can float to the respawn, float back, die, and respawn there
#6 is an expansion: chests/Beacons/ether interactions
#7 is a boss battle, having phases and getting you the Lava Blade.

Time.
#1 is a tutorial about what the sword's powers are
#2 is a new mechanic: going in water removes the sword
#3 is an expansion: the sword, water streams and many items to juggle
#4 is a new mechanic: throwing your sword and picking it back up again, conserves Heat
#5 is a trick: you can throw your sword from a chest, despite having no Heat
#6 is an expansion: a combination of all mechanics so far, to form the ultimate puzzle!
#7 is the final boss, using some tricks from before, and giving story clues.

Note that some puzzles are not on the list; those were either too small (that you needed to have a third key before the castle), merged into a bigger puzzle (the two small islands before the sword-throw/retrieve puzzle), or just some funny idea I wanted to implement (falling down with the Metal Spell, then climbing back up). Just having puzzle after puzzle gets old.

Interesting, isn't it? I make puzzle maps for a full year with all the time in the world, and the moment a strong deadline comes up, I realize what all my maps have been missing. Not originality, not creativity, but freshness. The levels I used to make dragged out for too long, and it was just repeating the same elements in a different order every time. But now I had no time to create many puzzles, so instead I want for a minimalistic artsy approach with smaller-scaled puzzles. And it worked so much better, somehow.

#DIFFICULTY
The difficulty of the puzzles, for once, was just right. I've had three people test it before deciding it's good, two of which tested before the jam ended so I had time to improve it. None of them had much trouble with the puzzles apart from the occasional hiccup, and I was happy to see that different people had different puzzles they couldn't completely figure out. A shame that the first two testers had a version with too many skippable puzzles, but after more people play it, we'll see how challenging the final puzzles really are.

Seeing the order of puzzles in hindsight, I do wish I introduces the Metal spell a bit later in the Space chapter. After the initial discovery, the puzzles were a bit uninteresting, though still entertaining enough. 

#UPSIDES
A few things in this map were things I didn't want to do, but I had some time left causing me to do them anyway. I didn't know I could:
- add sounds that actually make the chapter introductions much cooler
- make models for levers, and make them different colors in your inventory
- clone one thing many times, and making it look good
- guiding players in tutorials without or with few words
It's do or die, I suppose.

#DOWNSIDES
Of course, the hard time limit had its drawbacks. Mainly the beacons (which are a cool mechanic I stole from my own map!) were relatively buggy, allowing people to softlock themselves in various ways. I did fix this, but roughly 6 hours too late, as the jam ended at 5 am in my timezone. The decorations look very good for in a short time, but taking a closer look, they can be much better. Then again, I wouldn't have much motivation to make them better... easy decoration works as good as complicated decoration, I guess.

#TUTORIALS
It would've been so easy to give the players a bunch of tellraw text, hell, even a book that had instructions in it. But it would've been too easy. Many maps already have deep tutorials in them, I do it too in my dungeon crawlers. Nothing wrong with it, but because this maps mechanics are so damn simple, there's no reason to force it too much. I decided that vague tellraw messages, in combination with item lore, would be enough; and it was. Although the Lava Blade was a bit finnicky, people figured it out.

#CONCLUSION
Good mapjam. Learned about puzzle design, funny how that goes. I also learned that sitting behind your computer literally the whole day isn't great for your health, but whatever, it's just two days of madness. I'm writing this before large-scale testing (aka release), so I'll have to see how the multiplayer system handles everything and stuff. I did build one!

"I just never tested it."

- Dieuwt


