I wanted to make this post to discuss the process of moulding Reflection to the game it will become.

Originally, the concept of the Reflection was the following,

A 3D navigational and collection walking simulator. You're traversing a ruined world. Any reflection in the environment lets you bounce between your world and a mirror world of the past. Find your way into and around places to discover more about the past and what happened. For example, a puzzle could be that in an area without reflections, you let a faucet run and the spilled water can create a way into a locked house.

Now, this idea had a few things about it that already made the scope too large. Our team first decided that rather than a ruined world, we'd want the player to experience a constrained environment - like a house or a mansion. This was to physically narrow the scope down to rooms that we can create ourselves.

Secondly, the team wanted to really nail what this 'reflection' mechanic would entail. We found that having the past affect the present might prove to be too difficult and can result in wonky behaviour so eventually, we decided to let the 'reflection' be a means of passing through the past where the player themselves are the means to direct change (through items, and physical manipulation of objects). 

We wanted Reflection to have a central mechanic that we'd continue to build on in new ways as the game progressed, while also having the narrative be an element to the game for the user to discover. We experimented and suggested various puzzles but realized after our pitch that we were overreaching on a lot of our puzzle ideas that would broaden our scope too much.

As such, our task then became how we're going to implement these mirror puzzles to keep the player having fun and what our story will be to keep the player interested.

- Zuhab