[Update 4]

The mechanics are really clever, and is quite pleasant to look at. I look forward to playing this!

Thank you! I'm glad you like the mechanics. I did some playtesting with a friend yesterday and there were a couple things that came up where they didn't understand how a mechanic worked so had trouble with some early puzzles. But usually for these things I can think of a better way to teach it, and my goal is to not have to resort to text instructions. I think the key is first introducing each element in a very simple level where they can easily figure it out after one or two tries and it's very obvious what's happening.

Update 4
I've been working further on ripple/foam effects for the water and I'm really happy with the results:




To achieve this effect, I'm sampling a moving ripple texture for each of the 6 hex directions and blending them together based on the flow into that tile. After a tile recieves flow, I also make some ripples come off the walls as if they are bouncing. And the texture moves down the waterfalls according to gravity as well, which gives a foam/whitewater look. I'm also doing some refraction based on the ripple textures. All in all, this adds a lot of movement to the water and makes it more enjoyable to watch it flow over things.

I'm going to move away from the visuals for now and focus on mechanics and creating levels -- after playtesting yesterday I want to try teaching some things in different ways and smooth out the learning curve a bit. I also want to create some more complex puzzles and try out some new mechanics.

[Update 3]

Update 3

I've been working on improving the look of the water in the game, and the first step to nicer water is improving the way it moves. Previously, each tile just had a static mesh that would be raised up to the water level of that tile. Now I'm dynamically changing the meshes at runtime so you can see the water deform and flow from tile to tile:



I'm using a similar technique to render the downward flow in waterfalls, which I think turned out really nicely:



Technical explanation

The underlying simulation hasn't changed much -- most of the information used to manipulate the meshes already existed in the simulation data. When water flows into an empty tile, there's a delay of several frames between it leaving one tile and appearing in the other. Each tile has 6 ring buffers, one for each neighbour, that track the flow coming in from that neighbour for the next few frames.

In order to show the flow from tile to tile, I can move each vertex in a tile's water mesh (pictured below) up and down by sampling the cumulative flow in each of the ring buffers up to a certain frame in the future. The number of frames to look ahead in each buffer depends on the vertex's distance from the respective neighbour tile. Then, to connect the meshes between tiles I take the minimum height where two vertices overlap.



The waterfalls work in a similar way -- each tile has six ring buffers representing waterfall flow, and the number of frames water will remain in a waterfall is based on the distance to the tile below with a constant acceleration (gravity).

The mesh for waterfalls looks like this:



Notice how the vertices are further apart as you go down the mesh. Each vertex is positioned where the water should be on a given frame based on gravity. So to show the water flowing downwards, I can sample the flow in the waterfall buffer for each vertex's corresponding frame, and move the vertex in and out accordingly. This works because the water material is designed to fade out as it approaches a surface, so if there's no flow the water will appear transparent. I found it looks nicer if the vertices are spaced 2 frames apart and blend 2 samples from the ring buffer, as it smooths out some weirdness with the simulation.

Next I am going to play around with adding some texture and movement to the surface of the water (ripples?) before getting back to working on mechanics and building levels. Really, that should be the priority but I enjoy working on the visuals too much!

Playing with burn gradients for colour grading.

[Update 2]

Update 2

I've been playing aound with the colour grading. Previously I was using the build-in colour grading in the Unity Post-Processing stack to set YRGB curves for colour grading. I used this to add some blue into the shadows (to give the impression of some slight atmospheric haze) and to increase contrast a bit. However, I felt things still looked a bit flat, and darkening the shadows any more made the lighting seem a bit too harsh as it's supposed to be partially cloudy.

What I've settled on now is a gradient overlay with a burn blend mode, which makes things look hazier at the top and higher contrast towards the bottom of the screen. I did this by modifying the built-in mask Vignette effect -- now rather than multiplying a chosen colour based on the value in the vignette texture, I can define two colours which it will lerp between according to the vignette texture value, and use the lerped colour to do a "color burn" effect. The formula for that is 1 - (1 - destColor) / burnColor. I found this looks nicest in gamma colour space rather than linear, so I had to convert to gamma before doing the calculation and then back to linear space after -- as far as I can tell there's no easy way to apply the effect after Unity performs the linear -> gamma conversion for display, but it works. Here's a comparison of the different Colour Gradings:





I'm pretty happy with the results, it definitely is adding some depth and contrast to the scene. Another nice thing is that I should be able to change the colours on level transisions as you play through the game, to get some visual variety and achieve different moods. That's it for now!

Cool stuff! It's interesting how the terrain deformation almost seems almost liquid or soft. I think it's just because it happens gradually rather than all at once on impact, but it's an effect I don't think I've seen before.

[Update 1]

Thanks! Glad to hear you all like the look of the game. Originally the flat shaded look was just to get something working quickly, but after tweaking the line rendering and adding post-processing and shadows I'm liking the style.

Update 1

When playtesting, one piece of common feedback I've received is that it would be nice to have a visual indicator of which tiles can currently be eroded. This would also help if playing with a touchscreen, where you can't hover over a tile to see if it's highlighted.

Rather than an out-of-world solution, like outlining or highlighting the tiles, I figured the best way to do this would be to give some visual indicator of "wetness", since it's always the tiles around water that can be eroded. These also happen to be the tiles that vegetation can spread between, so it should help in learning the rules of the game and how everything behaves.
I wrote a custom shader for the tiles so I can have more control over their appearance (previously I was using Unity's default shaders for solid objects in the game). I added a wetness parameter, and separate colors for when the material is dry or wet so I can fade between them when the tile's wetness changes.



This works really well for the vegetation, as it can be yellowish when dried out and a deeper green when wet. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good result this way for the rock tiles. Either it was too subtle so as to be unnoticeable in a lot of situations, or it was too dark and didn't contrast enough with the sides of the columns. Maybe if the side of the column where it can be eroded down to was discolored as well this could work better; I might explore that in the future.

For now I've settled on having a small puddle form in the middle of rock tiles that are wet. As a bonus I can now use this same type of animation for when any tile is emptied of water, rather than just having the water fade into the ground.
You can see these same kinds of puddles in real life on columnar basaslt columns like in the Giant's Causeway so I thought it was appropriate, but still not totally sure if I will keep it like this as it does break the minimal look a bit. After playing with it a while it definitely does help with the user experience.
Here's what it looks like:



Now that I have the concept of tiles being "wet" or "dry", I decided to change it so that if you've grown a flower on a tile and the tile becomes dry, the flower dies. All sunny tiles need flowers in order to complete a puzzle, so this gives me another mechanic I can use to make more complex levels.



Keep in mind that the flower art and animations are somewhat placeholder; I'm hoping to replace them with 3D models with proper growth/death animations later, or maybe even procedurally generate them so each one can be different.
That's it for now! I'm currently playing around with fullscreen gradient color overlays to make things look more visually interesting and add contrast, so that's probably what the next update will be about.

[Spring Falls is a puzzle game about water, erosion, and watching things grow.]

Spring Falls is a puzzle game about water, erosion, and watching things grow.

Manipulate the landscape and bring wildflowers to life as you make your way down a peaceful mountainside.

Soft visuals, ambient guitar work, and environmental sounds come together to create a meditative, relaxing experience.

Coming November 17th

Pre-order on the App Store

Wishlist on Steam






This devlog details the development of the game.

Visit the Website
Latest post (Update 16)

Original post:

Hexagon Falls is an isometric tile-based puzzle game about erosion.

The objective is to spread vegetation to sunlit tiles so that flowers can grow. This is done by eroding tiles that are next to water, directing the water so that the vegetation can spread around it.

The game is early in development, but most of the base functionality is there (basic water physics, vegetation spreading, level progression). I've created a handful of levels so far that show the potential of complexity of puzzles. I am trying to design the game such that no on-screen direction is required and the player can experiment and figure out the mechanics on their own; I've done a bit of player testing and so far this seems to be working well.





I have a few ideas for different mechanics and tile types that I will introduce gradually throughout the game, but for the most part I am trying to keep things simple; explore a small number of mechanics deeply and build on the player's previously gained knowledge.

I'm not totally set on the name yet, so I'm sort of considering "Hexagon Falls" to be a working title for now.

This is a solo project, and I'm starting this devlog in order to share my work with the community and to keep myself motivated. I will try to update it at least once a week.

So, I played around with your formula in a graphing calculator and I found that y = ( x * 0.58 )^2.8 is very very close up until 0.8 (where your formula starts turning downward again). The reciprocal of that would be a simple x = ( y^( 1/2.8 ))/0.58

It also gives you two constants to play around with to get it just right. If you only care up to 0.7, then the constants 0.63 and 3, or 0.65 and 3.1 might be closer. Give it a try!

I love the look of that water and the detailed account you gave of figuring it out! I will need to look into Gerstner Waves if I ever need to get some good-looking water displacement...

It's amazing how good some cheap interpolation can look -- in that last gif it almost looks like you're doing a physical simulation for buoyancy.

Hi everyone! My name is Eric Billingsley and I'm an indie game developer from Ottawa, Canada. I graduated with a Computer Science degree in december and I love working on games. I'm currently working on games and looking for jobs. One of my favourite things is when a set of simple rules can lead to deep strategy and complex interactions in games (Go is probably the best example of this).

Some of my favourite AAA games:
-Populous: The Beginning
-Elder Scrolls series
-Half Life series

Some of my favourite indie picks:
-Osmos
-Braid
-Minecraft
-Spelunky
-Auralux
-The Polynomial

I look forward to being a part of this great community!

-Eric

[- Website -]

I've just released my first commercial game, Star-Twine! It's an abstract, ambient 3D real-time strategy game. This is a one-man project that I worked on during my spare time over the past two and a half years. The full version costs $9.99 CAD and there is a free demo available as well. Enjoy!



- Website -






- Download  -

Star-Twine is a strategy game with ambient sounds, unique visuals and a virtually infinite number of levels to play on.

Battles unfold on three-dimensional maps where you, a small point of light, must build structures to extract energy from the threads that make up the world. Energy can be spent on new structures, each with their own unique abilities.

The enemy AI builds while you build and reacts to your play-style. This results in challenging battles that require strategic insight and quick thinking.

Features:

-Unlimited number of procedurally generated levels
-Skirmish mode with multiple difficulties
-Online 1 vs 1 multiplayer and LAN play
-Unlimited number of procedurally generated levels
-Fully 3D maps where attacks can come from any angle
-Ambient electronic soundtrack and abstract visuals which create an atmospheric, relaxing experience
-Simple RTS gameplay that emphasizes positioning and timing rather than micro-management

Screenshots:




Thanks for checking it out and all feedback is appreciated!