Barth had envisioned the game as his first commercial project, and based on feedback from Codex and other games, wanted to include a storyline along with the puzzles. The story missions included "defense" puzzles that typically were considered very hard to solve; Barth recognized after release that players would stall out at these puzzles and not attempt to complete the game, with only 2% of the players tracked having reached the final puzzle. Barth would have likely placed the harder puzzles at the end or as part of the ResearchNet add-on. He also tried too much to incorporate a theme based on scientific research, popularized at the time by the success of Portal. He instead found potential players were scared off by the chemistry aspect even though the game had little connection to real chemistry; a colleague had once suggested to Barth that if the game was named SpaceGems and modeled around alchemy, the game would have sold twice as many copies.
