RGB Debriefing

RGB is the reason we prototype games. What seemed, in my head, to be a clever, elegant puzzle game turned out to be sort of a shallow, boring one.

HOT POTATOES:

One of my personal criteria for a good puzzle game is simple mechanics. Really good puzzle games take a small rule set (like the various Japanese number puzzles) or a single interesting mechanic (Portal, or the different chapters in Braid) & craft interesting puzzles from that minimal toolkit. If you have to remember a bunch of rules & relationships (looking at you, Road Not Taken) then it's not a good puzzle game.

However...

COLD POTATOES:

The problem in this case is that it's just not very fun or interesting. RGB puts a big check in the elegance box but the puzzles just don't end up feeling worth the player's effort. I really don't like randomly generated puzzles, like, at all. A good puzzle game should feel like you're playing one-on-one against the designer; it should feel like an interaction with the puzzle crafter. RGB isn't as cold as, say, Minesweeper, but it's not that far off. Hand crafting puzzles would have taken a long time & I don't think that the benefit it would provide would be enough to save the game. So yeah, I took the easy way out.

CONCLUSION:

I only put a few hours of effort into this one so I'm not sweating it. It's good for maybe an hour or two of achievement hunting if you're really into puzzle games. I might use this mechanic as a part of another game (it might work as a room in a Chip's Challenge-ish game or something) but it's just not deep enough to make an entire game out of.