[trgfdffd]

Great article! Just a thought: if it was that hard for OP to write the logic for the gravity manipulation, he should've taken this as an indication that it'd be hard for players to understand and learn this functionality too.

Perhaps one small lesson missed?

[pdrummond]

OP here. I seriously thought about giving up on the gravity implementation many times, but not because the coding logic was difficult. I was more concerned that the player wouldn't find it compelling as I had early feedback it was way too confusing from player's perspective and I was too close to the game to notice it.

In the end, as it turned out, it wasn't the gravity mechanic that was too confusing, it was how haphazardly I initially implemented it. After months of playtesting and tweaking the difficulty curve in the early levels, I finally hit the sweet spot (which was measured based on feedback from play testers - mainly family, friends and a few colleagues).

[hbn]

Is difficulty of implementation really a reliable indicator for the complexity in players understanding the mechanic?

Jonathan Blow did a talk[1] at GDC a few years ago about implementing the time rewind mechanic in his game, Braid. It ended up being a pretty complex system that required a lot of ingenuity to come up with a design and implement it, but the end result is pretty straightforward and easy to understand for players.

[1] https://youtu.be/8dinUbg2h70

[trgfdffd]

I propose that it depends on why it's difficult to implement. If the behaviour is easy to explain in English but requires a complex technical solution to enable it then that's one matter.

However, if you struggle to even describe the behaviour in English then it is a good indicator that users may struggle to understand it too.

I am assuming this is the case here. It may be that the OP had a very clear idea of how the gravity and all its edge cases would hang together but just struggled to code it. I interpreted the article's wording differently.

I do think not being able to simply describe a key game mechanic in natural language is indicative that it may be hard for users to deduce too.