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[Udderdude]

Going to give this a try in a bit.

Edit: Gave it a try.  My biggest issue so far is the default controls for rotate left/right and zoom make no sense.  Why not just make rotate left/right is A,D and zoom in/out is W,S?  Makes a lot more sense to me that way.

Also, the countdown beep before the level starts is REALLY loud compared to the rest of the sound effects.

Other than that, it's pretty fun.

[0x00000000]

Thanks for testing!

The ESDF defaults is because of different keyboard layouts : on my keyboard WASD is ZQSD (french azerty). But actually I'm wondering if I can use control codes for the defaults, or if GLFW already manages that and I didn't notice.

Someone else suggested removing entirely the timer on non-timed levels, which makes sense, there's no urgency there. I'll definitely tone it down for the bonus levels.

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Version 0.16

Windows / Linux (20MB) (still doesn't work with Intel GPUs)

Added more levels and some other minor changes. I still need to polish stuff before calling it a proper demo. I want to put it on Greenlight when I get it polished enough, so feedback is welcome.

[0x00000000]

Bloom and light blocks

It looks like the most common complaint about the game is its darkness. But if I tried to add lighting close to the player he would clip inside the light sources. So I added blocks that act as light sources :



I also had to add bloom so that they actually look like they're emitting light. You can move the blocks, and the light moves with them of course.

I'm trying to get everything done for the demo for this weekend. I still have the website to do and a decent gameplay video.

[Udderdude]

Do the lit blocks do anything special?  If they don't, it may be confusing to the player that thinks they're special.  They certianly stand out a lot more.

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Mechanically, they're the same as the normal blocks. I'm going to put at least one in the tutorial levels to teach the player that you can move it and walk on it, maybe even add the info in a text box.

I think they will be mainly in unreachable places anyway, to make for more coherent lighting (the light sources come out of nowhere right now).

Oh and I found out why game developers like bloom so much.



Because it's FUN to watch things glow.



Seriously though, that last screenshot murdered my FPS.

[Udderdude]

I would come up with a different solution to your lighting issue than those cubes, they really kind of ruin the atmosphere the game had going. D:

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They kind of hurt people's eyes apparently Oh well, the fire and teleporter blocks still benefit from the bloom addition, as well as the star particles that glow even brighter now. I might find some other uses (giant star in the skybox? meteors?)

I think I found the solution : a brightness slider. I don't know how it's supposed to be done in other games, but here I just skew the colors upwards with the pow() function (with an exponent < 1).
And I needed this setting anyway.
So here's the same screenshot three times, with brightness 0/50/100 :





0 was the old default, 50 is the new one. I do think it looks clearer without changing too much the atmosphere.

The max brightness screenshot is pretty washed out, but some people might want to play like that, so eh. And if the ingame settings are not enough, you can edit the settings file with -50 or 250 as brightness. It'll look bad but it won't be my fault.


Edit : Gamma correction, it is a power law. Sweet.

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I'm starting to write content for the website, so I've put up a tutorial, because some people like to read a lot about a game before actually trying it (...like me). There's no style to the page, so it's just text and images on a white background. I want to add a tutorial video later too. I'd like to know if some things are unclear in that page.

Edit : and I've added a screenshot in the first post.

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The website is now much improved.



is there now too. How the hell are you supposed to make trailers for puzzle games? I can't really put action music over it, that would be weird.

So anyway, Greenlight next week with a new build fixing bugs and stuff. At least that's the plan. Of course I've been saying that for the past 2 weeks.

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Demo 0.2 and Greenlight

Here's the demo!
Windows / Linux (32/64 bits) (~20MB)

Fixes some bugs, adds some settings (brightness!).

And I just launched the Greenlight for it. Unfortunately puzzle games are pretty niche, so I don't know what's going to happen.