Hello everyone,
let's get this devlog started!
I am a big fan of adventure/puzzle games: especially old school graphical adventure games, think Myst or Machinarium, or closer to the iPad, The Room. All of which are obvious influences on the project I'm working on: an iPad 3D puzzle game called 'Machinika Museum'.
This is an iOS-only project for two reasons: 1) I love the touch interface for manipulating virtual object, and 2) being a performance-demanding 3D game I don't want to (and can't) deal with the compatibility & performance issues of the countless Android devices. Later on if it catches on I'll give Droids a second look.
GameplayIn a sci-fi setting you get to solve a number of machines and various technological artifacts. Taking advantage of the touch interface of the iPad you manipulate parts, assemble them, work on locks, mechanical and electronical devices of various kinds, to basically figure how this stuff work. Expect lots of sliding, rotating, pushing, and mechanical puzzle solving. Using your fingers, and a couple other tools (what's a tinkerer without his screwdriver and a x-ray cam?). Some of the machines that you solve along the way can be kept and used to solve other future machines.
StoryIn an indeterminate future you work for the Planetary Museum as technical consultant. From a dimly lit basement your task is to analyse, and fix, the various technological discoveries sent to the museum from the far reaches of the galaxy.
Everything is going fine until you receive a batch of mysterious machines whose origin is kept hidden by your hierarchy. What's up with that? well, only one way to know: work your way through the machines to piece together what is going on here. You might, or might not, enjoy where that will take you...
Current statusA prototype has been developped which will help in the coming months to raise funds to develop the full thing. It is focused on a single machine: a type of advanced 3D printer. And the full thing runs under 10 minutes on the first playthrough; it is a prototype, not a full demo.
The final game should hover at around 12 machines, of various sizes and gameplay length, for a (highly) tentative total play time of under 2 hours. I am intentionnaly keeping it 'short' to focus on quality over quantity. This kind of visual-intensive puzzler is long to develop if you want to do it well.
VideoThey say a YouTube video is worth a thousand words; or was that a picture? Ha, what the hell, here is a first (lowres-ish) video showing parts of the current prototype. Intentionnaly there is quite a bit that isn't shown here; gotta keep some surprises.
That gameplay footage was captured on PC out of commodity, but the game is exactly the same on iOS. I'm still working out a proper solution to capture multi-touch input gameplay on PC (
)hence no multitouch gameplay shown in this video. Also, do not be surprised if some of the texts here are currently written in my native French..
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Gameplay Video -
- Machinika Museum, prototype 1, feb 2015 -
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Music credit goes to the wonderful Kevin McLeod (
@ Incompetech)
Tools of the tradeSo far the project was set up with Unity Free 4.6, but the recent unveiling of Unity 5's Personnal Edition make me reconsider this (obviously). In fact the screenshots above are taken in Unity 5 to try out their bloom & color correction post processes. But performance considerations will probably prevent me from using this on iPad: on my old iPad Mini this slashes a solid 15FPS from the framerate...
Who works on this?Mostly me, at least right now. I'm Greg, 36, living in France, always worked in the game industry, in various positions (mostly sitting at a desk though). On this project I take care of the design, visuals, sounds, and part of the coding. But I'm just a part time lousy programmer, so last month I got a good help to script up the more difficult core systems. Hopefully in a not too distant future I'll try to get two more people on board, and eventually set up a proper company to frame all this; but we're not there yet..
In the meantime I'll keep polishing up the prototype. There is a gameplay system that isn't featured in the video I need to clean up a bit before showing it. There is also one more core gameplay system I want to add. Also there are a couple assets that could really use an upgrade.. And last of all I need to get my draw calls under 200. (did I say that out loud?). Right now I'm only hitting 45fps on my iPad Mini, which isn't exactly enough...
I look forward to sharing all this..