How Difficult Is It To Make A Game About Opening Doors?

thegamer.com:

Animating an ornate, beautiful door in a video game has been said by several developers to be one of the most laborious design processes ever; Death Trash developer Stephan Hövelbrinks, for instance, have said that doors “have all sorts of possible bugs” and can be “a lot of pain”, whereas Crystal Dynamics game director Will Kerslake has, in an interview with The Verge, talked about how there are “so many issues with doors”. Part of the problem with video game doors is that they can be interacted with in so many ways and across so many different situations, that getting all these right can be a tall task. How would doors open and close during combat situations? What happens if an object is obstructing the door’s path? For all these reasons, many developers simply do not want to deal with the nitty-gritty of functional doors and decide to just dispense with them altogether. One example is the Assassin’s Creed series; with the exception of Valhalla, the series has mostly chosen to not feature doors in its games at all.

So it came as a surprise when I chanced upon an indie game that is all about doors. Doors, doors, and more doors: you open them, close them, walk in them, and explore different realms through them. There are even fake doors to open, and doors on the floor to drop your entire body through. This particular game is called Just More Doors, developed by French indie studio Teagher Studio, and is an exploration game in which the point is to open as many doors as possible until you achieve a nebulous victory… of sorts. I was curious about how much work it takes for the studio to make a game full of doors, and whether it was a logistical and design nightmare for them. The short answer is that it isn’t—but there were