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[Leon Fook]

Any sample for the concept art?
I prefer having information about the world though. The more i know about the world, the more i (might) like it. Maybe it can tell a story of someone and player have to treasure hunt using the info provided by the diskette. Cool item hidden inside the world would be cool. Or maybe alternate ending if find all the said diskette, maybe having story of each place and player would have to visit it.
Anyway, i prefer anything other than concept art. I don't play the game to look at concept art.

[Hempuli‽]

But if it were concept art that wasn't pixel centric it'd clash with the aesthetics & remind me I'm playing a game. Unless it's only accessible through the main menu that is, but I'd definitely prefer in game lore. That's my two cents anyway.

A very good point! I just fear that having just text might feel a bit boring for the player and lessen their interest in finding all the bonus diskettes. Then again, obviously keeping it somewhat simple might be the best solution for me, haha.

[James Edward Smith]

A very good point! I just fear that having just text might feel a bit boring for the player and lessen their interest in finding all the bonus diskettes. Then again, obviously keeping it somewhat simple might be the best solution for me, haha.

Yeah, I dunno, all of those options sound kind of lame. If the point of the data disks is just meant to be a fun thing to try and find though, I guess it doesn't matter too much.

Generally, I'm not a big fan of "find all the x" type pickups in a lot of platform games, unless they have some believable narrative connection, or a mechanical one. But the other thing that makes them a lot better in my mind is when there is some variety to them. What I mean is, "Find the letters D O N K E Y K O N G in the level" seems very boring to me, because it's just the same every level. What I liked better are things like the bonus eggs in Dino run, where every egg was a different named egg. Graphic asset wise, they weren't anything THAT special, but they all looked slightly different and sometimes the location you found them in matched up with what the name of the egg was to tell a little bit of a story. (The Alien Egg being in inside of a meteor that crashes during a level, for instance).

An other good example of this is The Great Cave Offensive in Kirby's Superstar. The entire chapter is basically a find all the maguffins quest. But since each treasure was actually unique (a gold coin, a cooking pot, Samus' helmet, the triforce, etc), it made grabbing each one doubly rewarding. You had the completion of actually finding and getting to the treasure, and then the surprise of what it turned out to be.

So what I would like to suggest doing is the text records of the game lore thing since it's pretty easy to accomplish, but I why not make each record stored on a slightly different piece of media? You could do a floppy disk, a diskette, an external hard drive, a zip drive, different shaped usb drives, a CD, a mini-disc, a cartridge, a rom chip, a post-it note, a cassette, bernoulli disk, a holo cube, some sort of futuristic biological DNA storage medium thing, oh oh, an isolinear chip like in Star Trek, etc.

[Whiteclaws]

Remember when in Fez you would have some kind of hidden story and you would need to decipher some kind of alien code?

This game needs it, and really badly... Some signs of an old civilization that explained the lore and a back story hidden in the environments and such, look up  

Would be amazing if that story would be explained and you could hide some ultra secrets in the environment ... Like a riddle written in alien code that would give you a suite of inputs or that would insight towards the konami code...

In shorts, there's so much to explore, and I swear I'll be worth it

Or even, you could make a puzzle that would return a password to a zip file hidden in your game directory

[Hempuli‽]

words

Personally I'm a sucker for optional 100% macguffinry, but I agree with your point that they easily get boring if there are too many of them or if they serve no other purpose than to be there to be collected.

I like the "different media" idea, but I kind of want to keep the items and such coherent and not too humorous so it requires some more thought. Varying-looking collectables would certainly be doable, though!

I actually dislike the way Fez handled puzzles; it felt like there were very few puzzles that actually employed the game's mechanics and more those that required metagaming-like knowledge and out-of-game stuff to be solved. It felt too self-aware, I guess I could say; the game world wasn't very immersive when several of the puzzles required metaknowledge.

There'll be some rather obscure secrets in the game, but for puzzle/secret design I much prefer the La-Mulana way of having everything be obscure, but solvable with the tools one finds in the game. The problem with having unlockable story tidbits is that I don't think I'm a very good storyteller I don't think I could write a very engaging "secret" story to go with the game.

[Noogai03]

I like SOME of Fez's puzzles, but seemingly unsolvable codes relying on one specific object in the large game world which is a nightmare to find are annoying as hell...
I spent SO MUCH TIME trying to re-find the Rosetta Stone thing...
Some of the code-based puzzles were basically impossible to a bear of very little brain like me, case in point the binary star in the observatory...

Also I hated how the QR code was A) so blazingly obvious and B) not properly ported as it translated to RT LT RT etc which sucked on windows (just an annoying detail)
I liked the rotation puzzles though.

[Whiteclaws]

I would be thinking of putting in some alien code, then on objects (like a TV) , you would put one of the alien letters (A sheet of paper) then that letter would be the first letter of that object or some kind of secrets, it doesn't need to be found to complete the game, but finding it gives you access to secrets and a back story,   was putting in metasecrets that were needed to complete the game, but you can put in secrets that don't even affect the main plot
Finding each would give you everything about the main plot, while the player can keep it obscure

[Noogai03]

I would be thinking of putting in some alien code, then on objects (like a TV) , you would put one of the alien letters (A sheet of paper) then that letter would be the first letter of that object or some kind of secrets, it doesn't need to be found to complete the game, but finding it gives you access to secrets and a back story,   was putting in metasecrets that were needed to complete the game, but you can put in secrets that don't even affect the main plot
Finding each would give you everything about the main plot, while the player can keep it obscure

I also really didn't like how you weren't sure if your code had unlocked anything until it happened

In my opinion, if you're going to put puzzles in a 2D platformer then portal-style cube and button puzzles and jumping puzzles (that sort of thing; something PHYSICAL anyway) are better than theoretical stuff that nobody really understands
I did like the puzzles in Fez at times, though.

[Boreal]

As far as puzzles in this type of game go, I really like the shinespark puzzles in the Metroid games (especially Zero Mission).

[Hempuli‽]

The thing is, what I'm talking about here are the puzzles related to hidden portions of the game; I think it'd be cool if the puzzles (or "puzzles") in the "main game" were more physical in nature, whereas the actual secret things were more obscure and required decrypting codes and whatnot - it could be a neat distinction.

Right now there are nearly no actual puzzles in the game. There's plenty of jumping and using your abilities to get to hard-to-reach place (those places might count as "jumping puzzles" but I find the term a bit weird) along with some "find a hidden thing" -situations, but actual "figure this out" puzzles are pretty much nonexistent. This is because of two things: coding them would've been kinda tough with how I had set the level editor up, and I also wanted to keep the game either action-oriented or puzzle-oriented, since I felt that very difficult puzzles might've annoyed those players who enjoy the jumping parts and vice versa.

There used to be block-pushing puzzles but I removed those because while the player's abilities offered some neat additional tricks to employ in them, they were pretty boring.

All in all, I think I'll try to write some lore or at least draw some lore-expanding pictures for the diskettes, with some of them maybe pointing to some better-hidden secrets. I really want to have something like Sacred Grounds: ESA edition in the game because endgame challenge gauntlets can be a lot of fun!

[Boreal]

I'd be wary with code decryption puzzles as they are basically metagaming and can also alienate non-English-speaking players.

[Leon Fook]

Symbol can be a nice code. not in the ABC way like Fez, though.
Braille works too, like how Game Freak make the puzzle for the Regis Trio in 3rd gen Pokemon.
Morse code works well, and like the above option, fair to all the player because it's somekind of language that wasn't used generally.

[Whiteclaws]

Collecting stuff to unfold a story is fine and all, but it's too cliché in my opinion, I prefer unfolding some alien puzzles or atleast get the diskettes after a hard to understand puzzle, meta-gaming puzzles are fine if they don't conflict with the main plot, and I find that they give the game a longer lifespan, I swear, and they are sooo freaking rewarding when you finally find the solution

TLDR; The Enviromnetal Station thingy start plot in your main trailer is enough, keep the story hidden with some ultra-hard puzzles and make it AMAZING, then let the main game be just action-oriented and some puzzles that tell nothing about the story, let the player imagine what happened and leak some info but keep the big part for the completionists, That'll give some afterlife to your game

I'll just throw a plot, The main engine stopped working because of a comet collision, thus the environments became unstable and multiple species mutated, But that station was actually a planet that got quarantined after the government's experiment on a secret nuclear bomb project thingy, and all those animals you are killing are actually humans, that mutated, and after those decades, there are survivors and those survivors let docs of their presence, and maybe you were sent to silence them but you only knew too late, you kill them at the beginning, but as you progress, you get their journal entries and you find out that they were harmless

That would be an amazing twist, like, in their last journal, you read
"It's been a decade now, At last, there's a ship that's coming, they are going to save us!"
Then, you find out that journal near the place where you kill them

[kleiba]

Man, that would be so depressing...

[Hempuli‽]

I have had a plot planned from the very beginning, and the player's progression is very closely linked to advancing the plot, so leaving it out or making it optional isn't really an option at this point. In fact, there's even an ending cutscene that resolves the plot (and contains a TWIST!)

keep the story hidden with some ultra-hard puzzles and make it AMAZING,

The AMAZING part is what I'm not certain of; I don't consider myself a good storyteller so I don't think I can rely on the story being very satisfying. This also why I asked here about what to do with the diskettes, since I think I'll have enough trouble making the "real story" captivating without adding in another, secret one. Problematic!

[Hempuli‽]

Progress has been smooth! I've dedicated this week to fixing any and all bugs the tester(s) find, tweaking things they don't get or like and implementing all the secrets left (there's going to be a ton of that stuff! Like, at the moment beating the game puts you at about 50% completion! I'll need to balance that in favour of the "actual" game, though, I think)

I think I'll dedicate next week for dialogue, cutscenes and stuff like that; they're the part I dislike most so it might be a good idea to try to power through them now instead of later. After that it'll be just tweaks and those data diskette things!

[SolarLune]

Oh boy! The game's looking really great! Good to hear that you're almost through with it!

[Hempuli‽]

Just a gif of a mineral glow/glitter effect I made; nothing fancy but I think it works!

[Scott]

Oh wow! I haven't been here in a few months and you should know it's really awesome to come back on and see how far this has come. Looks fantastic! Loving the environmental animation especially.

[baconman]

This project just continues smelling of insane polish.