Who Is This For?

Eggerland was moderately successful thirty years ago and has since fallen into relative obscurity. It certainly doesn’t have a loud fan base like some other retro games. In fact, most people seem to say, “Oh yeah, I remember those games.” Not exactly the glowing reminiscence you see for other games like Curse of Monkey Island or Baldur’s Gate, both of which have seen highly-anticipated renaissances in the past few years.

That’s not to say there aren’t eggheads out there who love the series! Yes, I’m calling us “eggheads”, I just made it up and I won’t stop saying it until it’s a thing. There are definitely people who would love to see Lolo return to his puzzling roots, but the success of a game depends on the strength of the community that musters around it. As of writing, there are 36 members in the r/eggerland subreddit, which is… frankly non-existent. Compare that to r/monkeyisland which is in the top 5% of largest Reddit communities and has three orders of magnitude more members than r/eggerland. Die-hard eggheads probably won’t carry this game on their own.

And yet Eggerworld doesn’t currently have any new graphics or mechanics. At the moment, it’s a faithful recreation of the Adventures of Lolo experience, largely unchanged from the last entry in the series. That's its biggest feature; the same game mechanics fans remember, remade in a modern engine. Who does that appeal to if not fans?

This strategy worked for the Blue Bomber, but far fewer people know about Lolo, who's more of a Blue... Ponder? Credit to The Cutting Room Floor and contributor Rabidabid for this image, used under the Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Original image can be found at https://tcrf.net/File:MM9_Title.PNG

Our plan to widen the game's appeal starts with our aforementioned deep study into improving the conveyance of the game. We are building a new, hopefully compelling set of puzzles in this otherwise faithful engine specifically geared towards teaching game mechanics in-game without boring tutorials or inane guesswork. We believe there is sufficient intrinsic value in the series but that it was previously held back by obtuse design choices, poor tutorialization, and bogus difficulty curves. I have no doubt there will be grizzled Eggerland veterans who will burn right through the initial offering of puzzles we’re building, but we must make the game accessible for new players who want to try it out.

There’s a great risk here: if we try to make the game easy enough for newcomers, then we could lose the interest of eggheads. And yet, if we make puzzles that challenge eggheads, then we will alienate newcomers. So we are going to try to appeal to both. We believe that excellent puzzles don’t need to be hard to be satisfying. We’re trying to make puzzles that newcomers will stick around for and feel good about, but that experts will hopefully also enjoy even if they aren’t necessarily challenged.

We don't want to leave experts out to dry though, so we are excited to include optional harder puzzles that players can graduate to once they’ve proven themselves. Hopefully new players don’t feel pressured to complete them and expert players feel inclined to continue with them. I've always felt that Adventures of Lolo 2 US had the best mix of difficulty and quality, so that's the average difficulty we're shooting for on these egghead puzzles, with maybe just a few butt-kickingly difficult puzzles for the Humpty Dumpties out there.

What sane person willingly puts themselves through this?

If this thing catches on with even a modest following then I’m sure there will be players with extreme thirst for difficulty, and that’s where the editor will eventually come in. Our puzzle set should give everyone the fundamentals they need to feel confident diving into the wild world of user-made content. In fact, we started this project as a puzzle-sharing application first, but we ultimately decided that newcomers would need something to teach them the game before being bombarded by Kaizo Lolo puzzles.

There are already a bazillion custom puzzles on the internet; look at this website by a particularly dedicated fan who made tons of Eggerland Mystery puzzles, at http://eggerland.msxblue.com/. I want to make sure this person has all the tools they need to remake and share these puzzles in our engine if they so choose, so we can consolidate the community’s rich history of puzzle-making. By the way, the Eggerland MSX Blue website has been an invaluable resource for talking about and reviewing every Eggerland game, so extra special thanks to this website and its maintainers for low-key helping us with everything Eggerworld.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about sharing these puzzles. Games like Super Mario Maker have shown how elegant it can be to build an experience where players can make and share levels in-game. Eggerland's gameplay is simple in concept and we believe the editor is already slick and easy to use, and this isn't even its final form. We are confident people will enjoy how easy it is to create and share meaningful Eggerworld content. I forget if I’ve mentioned this, but DevNull and I both use AWS professionally in our day jobs, and we have a proof of concept for puzzle sharing. We’ve already uploaded and shared puzzles with each other through these systems.

The goal is an editor as easy as Lego. Actually, making this mosaic was more time-consuming than making a puzzle in our editor.

Let’s come back to reality before I get totally carried away; we need to develop and complete one feature at a time if we want to get something out. Unfortunately we just don’t have the resources to get everything working all at once, so we do need to answer this immediate question to prioritize the right things: who is this project for, exactly?

Other than ourselves, of course, because it's totally the game we would love HAL to make.

We are building what we believe is the definitive Eggerland engine so that eggheads feel right at home bringing all past business here, but we are specifically building content in this engine to invite new players to become eggheads without having to do extra homework. Ideally newcomers will understand and enjoy this game even if they've never heard of Lolo before. I hope someone feels a touch of nostalgia for a game from their childhood that they’d mostly forgotten, and I hope some child today plays this game and creates their own new nostalgia. We are doing this to grow the world's appreciation of Eggerland because we want Eggerland to continue. Wouldn't it be great if Eggerland hit the mainstream?