Operation: Seat Of Power (Developer Commentary)

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 * "Being asked to perform in I Expect You To Die is my PROUDEST personal achievement! Little ol' Hivemind out there on the big stage... I couldn't have done it if it wasn't for my 45,732 assistants! You da real M.V-Bees!!"


 * "Finding ways to kill the player that can't be avoided is tricky. You can dodge a sawblade, duck as an arrow shoots towards your head, so we've found that things like deadly gas and explosions work well. You'll find we use deaths like that in just about every level somewhere. For this level we wanted to add some new ones, so we thought that maybe a cloud of bees could be a hard thing to avoid and worked similarly to gas with bee-sized particles. In an effort to cut the scope of the level, bees were on the chopping block. But that's when the Hivemind agreed to take a paycut and save the game!"


 * "In the past, we talked about our games having, uh, the goal of being transformational so they changed something about the player, usually for the better. As we developed I Expect You To Die levels, we've kinda realized that they have this additional pillar of being literally transformational, like uh, like an autobot. In the seated single location, though, the best way we found to do this is allow them to see your location in itself change, like compartments open, things transform and switch around, revealing toys to play with. Eh, that's the main reason the lectern on the table is this multifaceted device that's slowly showing its' complexity."


 * "This puzzle started off as a chess challenge, but it turned out to be very difficult to balance such that it would appeal to those familiar with chess rules as well as those with only rudimentary understanding. Next, the puzzle became tangram-inspired. It was going to be about making a Z-shape out of various geometric-shaped pieces. This, however, failed in early playtests as simply not being something that is fun with current generation VR controls. Finally, we settled on a simplified version where the real puzzle is figuring out that the golden pieces are meant to slot into the lectern. Initially, we had 12 pieces instead of 6."


 * "So this awesome statue of a bull by Thorn, one of our artists, was a primary reason we ended up setting this level in Madrid. Initially, we wanted Doctor Zor's private collection of art to just convey their dominating, brutal, aristocratic character, which the bull fight statue really excellently did. But, as the puzzle developed, the real-world location of where the bunker is took on such great importance that we were looking for kind of subtle ways to reinforce it in the the mind of the players. If you look at it, you can also see paintings inspired by the Spanish Armada's defeat just to reinforce the Spain setting. Of course the Handler at the beginning of the mission just tells you outright that he's sending you to Madrid, but we've kinda come to terms with the fact that no one listens to anything he says, so... It is what it is."


 * "When an opportunity presents itself, we like to make callbacks to previous levels of I Expect You To Die. This not only helps enrich the game's world, but can also serve as a hint. Some of the purely flavorful examples of this in the boardroom are the scorpion in the vivarium and calling Zor's weapons the "Death Engine", both of which are references from Friendly Skies."


 * "Adding an elevator button seemed like an obvious choice, but it quickly turned out having it poses a lot of game design challenges for the level. We worried about players being put off by the lack of it, but in playtests, nobody seemed to notice, let alone be bothered by it's absence."


 * "The name plaques in the room serve a few purposes. A hint to the location of the missing chair and the X-Ray goggles, foreshadowing of what henchman you will encounter in the level, and a reference to a defector from First Class. We initially wanted them to have a direct puzzle-solving application as well, where the player would be assaulted with multiple laser beams and would need to use all of the plaques to block the beams."