GDC 2007: Crush game design revealed

The puzzle platform has undergone many changes, in concept ideas and gameplay variety, while being able to draw in formerly non-puzzle gamers into the midst of their brain twisters. Crush, a PSP puzzle platform game from Sega, is one such game from the budding genre, being dubbed as "revolution twist on the puzzle platform."

At the Game Developer Conference Experimental Game Design lecture, principal designer Alex Butterfield discussed the main challenges the development team faced with a game that can seamlessly transform from 2D to 3D and back again. He discussed plenty of issues about the intricacies of level conversion, disorientation (it could get pretty confusing at first), principal problems with the "crushing mechanic," and higher dimension reasoning.

Of course, the development team has addressed most of these issues through the standard game development process. But Butterfield continued on to the next concepts of Crush's potential features, such as multiplayer through alternate realities and higher order crushing by introducing a fourth dimension. As the game will be released May or June 2007, it should redefine the direction the genre is going as far as concept and reasoning is concerned.