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(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/intro.PNG)

Tower of the Gorillion
A puzzle & action platformer.

Current stable demo: circuiton.com/gorillion (http://circuiton.com/gorillion/)

Steam Greenlight (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93024348)

Gameplay

You control two characters, either by switching between them, or controlling them simultaneously with a friend.

The catch is that the levels are all designed with a background and foreground layer which do not interact directly, though many puzzle elements and enemies are capable of interacting with both in different ways. Each player interacts only with his own layer.


The two characters progress through a series of forking level paths, in which each level features a different theme and gameplay element to figure out and overcome.

(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/canyon.PNG)

Style

The game was originally created using a Gameboy-style 4-colour palette which is still the version posted on the web. Some of the graphics became too difficult to distinguish between both front and back so after some consideration we decided to go with Gameboy Color style graphics. We're more or less adhering to the restrictions of on-screen unique colours, but have slightly violated other rules.

(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/cavern.PNG)

Storyline

The story is pretty rough at this point and has undergone several revisions to the setting, but the key plot is basically in tact.

In 199X, a tower appeared on the horizon beyond the edge of the earth, from which a strange howl could be heard in the distance. For centuries, human sacrifices would be cast over the edge of the earth to appease the Gorillion - the beast said to reside in the tower. If sacrifices are not sent, it is said that the demons living in the abyss will climb up to where the humans live and destroy them.

One day a wanderer decides to investigate an ancient ruin perched at the which overlooks the solitary tower floating in the clouds below.

This is the story of that man who refused the ideology of his time.

(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/ruins1.PNG)
(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/ruins2.png)

Current Status

The game is about 50% done right now, though I would like to say more.

The gameplay mechanics are more or less complete, and the levels are almost all roughed in. The music is also almost done.

Tilesets and other level artwork is about half done. Enemies are not yet complete, and Bosses are barely just started.

(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/desert.PNG)

In any case, please give the current version a play through if you feel like it.

Bonus screenshots from end of chapter 1 cutscene:

(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/02.png)
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/03.png)

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Update [130113] : Colour version demo online.

Once the second level boss is in maybe I'll include level 2 in the demo as well.
I've been putting off drawing and animating the huge boss sprites, but I'll probably start soon.

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Update [130117] : Fullscreen mode, 1x zoom, a few major but subtle UI adjustments, and a tiny bugfix.

You can play it in fullscreen now. I'll probably have it detect if you have a massive monitor and allow it to scale up to 3x in some cases.
1x zoom added as well for people with tiny monitors or who like straining their eyes.
Also fixed a bug in the 9th room which made progress impossible.

Now it's really back to work on the rest of the game.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this. Any feedback you leave is incredibly helpful.

I really like this, looking forward to more!

The way it switches between shared/split-screen is especially cool.

Will it cost (http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l8jyffmErB1qb91hto1_500.jpg)?

Looks fun :)

Looks absolutely gorgeous. The premise sounds great. I can tell this is going to be freakin' awesome. Will definitely have to check out the demo at some point.

EDIT: Also, the picture in the post above mine is hilarious.

Cool! Fun concept and great execution. Nothing to add really except YOU MADE GiRAFFES ENEMIES? AWESOME!!

Looked like fun and seems to have some interesting puzzles.

I just have a thought regarding the visual presentation of the platforms that you might want to have a look at. It is basically connected to how we see things in real life and how we calculate things in a depth perspective.
Right now you have the dark/black tileset behind the desaturated brighter set. In real life it would be the other way around, where things that are further away gets desaturated and have less contrast and kind of blends more into the background. Since you have it the revese way it might be harder for the brain to compute this background foreground relationship.
Maybe you have a reason for doing it this way, then keep it as it is, but otherwise I think it might just be a bit subconsiously confusing at times :)

Like the look of it otherwise and I bet you can get a lot of interesting gameplay situations out of that switching idea!
Keep up the cool stuff, looking forward to see more.

The graphics are really cool.

*Suscribed*

Thanks for the feedback. That is something we experimented with - the original prototype at TOJam 7 had the lighter colour in the background.

(http://circuiton.com/images/devlog/alpha.png)

In the end it was just too limiting to work with 4 colours only and having two separate layers of interaction, which is why we eventually removed that restriction.

I'll give it a try reversing light and dark and see how it looks.

The game looks awesome!
I've:

Yeah, I see how the 4 colours was a pretty tight restriction and I think you did a good choice going away from the game boy look to a wider spectrum of colours like in the more up to date screenshots. Though this 4 colour image you posted reads a bit better to me in sense of the relationship between the back and foreground level. Maybe the simple level design in that one is adding to that too.

Anyway I am sure you will figure it out. My concern was just that if the relationship between the back and foregound level wouldn't read as clear as you would want. Then the brain might be confused and subconciously not really keep track of which level you are on. I kind of saw that on youtube when a guy was testing your game and he suddenly tried to jump to a platform that wasn't in his current level and fell down and died. I kind of felt that he jumped intuitively and I think that you really want to avoid to have the player do mistakes like that. Maybe it is easier to keep track of this while playing the 2 player mode in comparison to the single player where you constantly toggle between the two levels.
Though, I really like the idea behind this and I am sure that either way the player will get in to reading the world pretty quick.  :handthumbsupL:

Greenlit this a while back, good concept and neatly executed too. I understand the change in palette, but the new layers need more contrast.

Revised demo is up in colour now. I took your suggestions and inverted the background and foreground. What do you think?

I tried out some of the beginning stages and it works pretty good, I got in to the foreground background quite quick.
Something I felt though, about being in the background level, was that it maybe would have been cool to have some tiles that you could see through. Like if there was a hole in the middle of a tile in the foreground wall so that you could see the edge of the platform in the background level. I found myself a couple of times running with the background character and fell of the edge when disapperaing behinde the foreground layer. It was most likely just my poor platforming skills but having some tiles that have some cracks or holes in them might be something to try out..?
Otherwise I totally see how you could put a lot of cool secret areas in a game like this. It was a cool feeling, I think it was on the second or third screen (spoiler) that you met a dead end with the background character and had to jump down a few steps back to get to a lower level which was kind of hidden by the foreground level. That was a really cool discovery. I love puzzle designs like that!

Btw, have you tried using different colours for the layers to up the contrast between them even more?
An what if the background character had the same dark value as the background tiles? In that case I think you would feel even more that he really belongs to the background level.

Music was cool too! Keep up the cool stuff!

You basically pointed out the same few things I was thinking, about changing the colours and particularly on having the cloaked guy's colour match a bit more closely with the paler background.

About the stuff with hiding in the background - there are a few little secrets hiding for the background player to find in later levels, so the little bits where you have to go out of sight in the first level are just to get you accustomed to that sort of gameplay. I'm glad you enjoyed that part of it. Some players are more confused by it at first than others but most people get a good laugh out of it once they figure it out.

Thanks for your continued input.

Could you put the background graphics as having less contrast? Perhaps blend at 50% with a solid grey version of the tile/sprite.. That might make it more obvious.

I saw the title screen and thought it was going to be a shadow of the colossus demake. But this looks pretty cool too. ;)

This is pretty cool.  I like the character switching mechanic, and you've got a nice visual style going here.

A couple points of feedback on the demo:
There should be some indication when one of the characters reaches their end-point on the screen.  Maybe a sound effect or something.
Also, this might just be personal preference, but the red-headband guy's jump felt a little bit sluggish to me.

Indicating where the next room is might be an idea, but I'd probably just do it on the first room. Were you unsure where to go on the first room only, or on some other ones as well?

I'll look into the possibly sluggish jump as well.

It was more that I had a moment of confusion when I hit the end of the room, because I didn't know if I had succeeded or not.  Just some little ding to let you know "congrats, one of your guys has made it to the end of the room, now do it with the other guy" would be a nice bit of player feedback.

Ok, yeah. In the first room anyway there has always been a little bit of confusion about how to progress. There'll probably be door-indicating tiles done up once tilemaps are back on the menu so maybe that'll help clear it up as well.

Digging this a lot. I especially like how clever the puzzles are without being too frustrating or stupidly easy. Props.

You know whats make me sad about Tower of Gorillion? The comments on Greenlight. I'm quite sure the commenters (some of them) are from the same species as youtube commenters, it almost makes me sad. Nonetheless, good job so far. It is not my kind of game, I'm not much into platformers, but I really dig the art style. I hope that, in the future, you can deliver us more games with such quality :D  Also, any plans on porting to the "new" platforms such as OUYA?

Yeaa, I take the comments with a grain of salt. Most of them are positive anyway, fortunately.

I haven't looked into OUYA specifically, but we're looking at possibly putting it on iOS and Android already, so I don't think OUYA is out of the question since it runs on Android, right? I don't know much about it, but I am open to putting it onto as many platforms as possible.

The pixel art is wonderful, looking forward to play this game :) ;)

lighter stuff should be on the foreground, darker one in the background, it's not me saying that but basic color theory, besides that and the annoying giant fox right at the beginning of the game, looks like fun

I believe that they wanted to create a lighting effect as if the moon was pointing towards the player, so most of the objects in the background are lit in a strange way, while the foreground is a bit more dark.
It's a sort of "silhouette effect". Even if I think that (if you wanted to obtain this effect) the cloud at the beginning should be placed in reverse order: the darkest on front, the lighter on the back.

the fact is: in the screenshots it's right, in the current demo is wrong :)

Also shadows casted from the foreground tiles on the background ones could help a lot

I agree with you, Eclipse.

We tried putting the darker tiles in the foreground after hearing some feedback, but since the latest public version we've reverted it to light tiles in the front and dark tiles in the back. Instead, we just took pure black out of the tiles altogether, and adjusted the colour slightly.

Yep  :ninja:
Played it and I think that is at times a little confusing... maybe some shadows will help!

awesome! and yes, pure black probably was making the contrast too high and that helped to the confusion, general rule is: background tiles needs to be a color more similar to the sky than the foreground ones, this way you can also achieve a nice "fog" effect :3

Rock on!  :handthumbsupL:

Screenshot Saturday update:

New tutorial level:
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/01.png)

Updated some tiles and colours in Ruins:
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/07.png)

Updated tiles in Desert, and sort of explanation of how the Desert's gimmick works.
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/04.png)
When one player moves, his whole layer scrolls with him, but does not affect the other player.
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/05.png)
This means that blocks that interact with both layers can be seen twice:
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/06.png)

Update to the demo version will go up soon too, with updated tiles, slightly updated layout, and with slightly closer to true fullscreen mode (will detect if your screen is big enough for 3x or 4x zoom and adjust accordingly).

Which of these two looks better?
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/01.png)
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/11.png)

Or, what about this? Entertaining the idea of having the background layer tiles with blacked out center to make it completely and totally unmistakable.
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/10.png)
(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/09.png)

Any opinions? I've been staring at this game for so long I can't tell what's confusing and what isn't anymore. It's second-nature to me.

Hey man. I really like the gameplay idea behind the desert world. Kind of reminds me of the mindset of Braid where each world has a specific rule/law of nature. If you haven't listened to the Jonathan Blow talk on Braid I would strongly recommend it.

Otherwise. I am sorry for butchering your graphics, but it felt easier to show it than explain it. Maybe you have tried it something similar to what I have done. I basically just chose two different colors for the levels and then had the more saturated colours in the foreground. Maybe this test could give you a fresh view or some good ideas.
 (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B0bewG5plMk/UQ2NoDiQRgI/AAAAAAAABU0/3QODJ-FnyLI/s1600/gorillion_contrast_saturation_test.jpg)

I guess it is a bit like Braid in that each world has its own mechanic, but I don't know if it's quite as extreme as some of Braid's.

Your edit with the much more strongly contrasting colours looks pretty cool actually. Maybe it's time to experiment with each level not being quite so monochromatic.

Thanks!

The switching mechanic is cool, but when I'm playing as Gewalt I still find myself aiming for the foreground Grimmer platforms when jumping. That's a sticky point with this mechanic, as players have to retrain their brains to aim for the background elements when playing as Gewalt. Then when I switch back to Grimmer, my first jump is to the background layer sometimes. There's a bit of spatial reasoning gymnastics going on which creates friction, at least for me.

Here's an idea to mitigate that:

What about when you switch to Gewalt, the foreground elements (the Grimmer layer) change tiles to the background set, and the background tileset switches to the foreground tile set, so the player is always aiming for the foreground elements when platforming. This could also prove confusing, but maybe worth a shot.

Good idea but it eliminates the option of 2-player mode.

Fair enough, I didn't see that there was a two player option.

Another thing, and this is very minor right now - Grimmer's idle pose doesn't fit the sword swinging anim, he's leaning back too much in the former, his upper body should be leaning forward more. Shifting his upper body, or even just his head a few pixels over would help with this.

Looking forward to seeing how this continues to develop, good work.

We decided to use a sort of blacked-out background layer to both make it much more obvious and feel like Gewalt is on the back-side of the ruins.

(http://circuiton.com/images/ss/20130201/15.png)

What do you guys think?

What do the ladders look like? Blocks? Looks good, but I think the background layer in that example could use a little more green or something to separate it hue-wise.

I LOVE THIS GAME! the retro graphics are really nice, and the gameplay is great

Looks amazing! Keep up the good work! I was surprised to see you switch from the gameboy palette but the color is looking amazing.

whats with the girrafes?