I would happily pay money for more Rene and Bird walk in my life. Just saying.

This looks really smooth. I can't get a sense from the video of how it's controlled, though.

How is the arcade mode going to operate? Score attack? Survival?

Thanks for the responses. Was a bit wary of making the thread. I'm far more a lurker than a poster.

The most interesting point to me is how the player places blocks - having to place something in a 3D space is always tricky if you want it to be as simple as the games premise.

This was the first thing that I tackled. I'll try to make some .gifs later that show what I'm doing. I saw this game as kind of a challenge to make mouse control in a 3D isometric space not feel awful. I think I've accomplished that. Hopefully I can have something playable up soon.

If you weren't already working on it, I'd probably give it a shot, just for fun.

Do it! The mechanics are easy to implement, so it's pretty immediately gratifying. And then you get to focus on polishing the elements you find important.

Will the block placing area be rotatable? Might make block placing a little easier.
Would also allow for puzzles with 6 shadows to match...*shudder*

I'm playing with rotation now. I think it's necessary, since more than half of all figures cannot be made unless rotation is there. An alternative to rotation would be a deletion tool. I might implement both just to feel it out.

This is a really cool idea, although I personally might hate playing it because isometry always messes with my head.

There are some shapes that are absolutely horrendous right now because of the projection. I'll need some advice from artists on how not to destroy the player's sense of space. isometric paradoxes are way too easy to manufacture.

[Umbragram is finished!]

Umbragram is finished!

Download it here:
http://games.evilrobotstuff.com/umbragram




Original Post


Hey, everyone. During GDC, I played around with isometric block puzzle ideas, and ended up stumbling upon this idea. The premise is that the player is presented with two shadows (XZ and YZ), and much construct the 3D isometric shape that casts those two shadows.

Design

It's not a terribly novel idea, but I presented it to a few people, and they responded positively. Picross (and any nonogram more generally) shares similar mechanics and objectives, and those games are rather popular. I feel like a lot of them are just busywork, though. I'm planning on keeping the game pretty short, with a small selection of handmade shadow pairs that exploit the premise in most interesting way possible. I don't want to waste the player's time with similar shapes.

There are a few shadow pairs that I've found that "unwrap" in interesting ways.

I've given some thought to how to make puzzles replayable (and whether that's even a good motivation at all), and the best I've come up with so far is a golf-like system of minimizing actions or blocks placed. The solution space of this game isn't very large though, and I think that optimal solutions for non-trivial shadows might be the most natural solution.

Visuals

Everything in the screenshot is a placeholder. I haven't decided what visual style I'm interested in for this, but given that it's really just a bunch of isometric cubes, it probably won't get much fancier than lines and glowing colors.

Tech

I'm writing the game in Lua with Love2D. It'll run on Mac and Windows, and if I find a Linux box or a friend with one, I might be able to provide Linux binaries too. Chances are I'll be releasing the source with the game once it's done.

What's next

Rotation: Not all shapes can be created at the moment, since only three faces of a cube are ever visible. Some questions arise. Should the target shadows rotate with the shape, or should only the shape rotate.
Comparing cast shadow with target shadow


Anyway, let me know what you think. I tried to do onegameamonth, but I'm coming in at more like onegameeverytwo. Making games is a mostly nights and weekends kind of thing, so progress is going to be a bit slower paced.

Yak shaving on a stupid library that let's me create multidimensional tables in a pleasant manner.

Code:

tabular(2):by(3):by(4):fill(function (a, b, c)
  return a + 2 * b + c^2
end)

Wow thanks for all the help. So basically use BitBucket over GitHub, and maybe just do command line stuff instead of a GUI program.

So I am starting to get some of the basic features, but what is the difference between forking the LWJGL repo and making it a submodule?

Forking the repo is semantically wrong for what you're doing. It would work, but I don't think you plan on making changes to LWJGL yourself. It's just a dependency. That makes submodules more appropriately suited for it.

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Submodules

Another benefit of not forking is that the history of your project doesn't become muddied by the history of LWJGL. Your repo is focused specifically on your code, and the submodule specifically on a dependency. Histories are minimally linked through a single file.

Even thought LWJGL is on github, you can keep your git repo on BitBucket (or even local), and set LWJGL as a submodule of your repo. Then you can just pull updates from LWJGL/master from within your project. Submodules don't play too nicely with branches, but I think in this case it won't be an issue.

I was holding on on replying because of the request last page, but this game would have looked beutiful. Good luck on MAZE.

Just randomly permute both lists?

It would be sufficient to just permute one. You would have random pairs, but you wouldn't have a random order of those pairs. I don't know if that satisfies the question, though.

Noisebridge teetotaler's hackathon/hangathon sounds like a good time.  I'm (probably) in if it happens.

Same. Noisebridge is within walking distance from my place, and I'd really like to spend a bit of time this week jamming. If it happens, definitely mention it in here.

Looking pretty good so far. The only thing that stood out is that it wasn't clear to me how the different tools detect hover states. Eventually I discovered that the pick tool will only detect new blocks if I hover over the top face. I still haven't figured out what triggers the painting tool, as it doesn't seem entirely consistent. It's especially evident on tunnels like the following

Code:

., 1, 2 = floor
X = wall

XXXXX
X1..X
XXX.X
XXX2X

Moving from 1 -> 2 feels fine, but moving in the opposite direction will behave differently, probably due to interference by the translucent cube that specifies where you're focusing.

Are you going to keep the github repo regularly up to date, or are you going to just do occasional pushes?

I love the idea of trying to find games within mathematical concepts, like this case with Fourier transforms. Has much thought been given to the interactions of the player? From the first post, you mentioned some exploration, but I'm not sure that a Fourier transform provides much in the way of variety to keep exploration interesting. That said, it looks beautiful, and I'm sure there is something that'll fall out of these prototypes.

This looks fantastic. I've been using Love2D for a while, and I love it. This strikes me as being a bit more batteries included, which will certainly be an upgrade over my homegrown utilities.

PolyCode seems to be pretty opinionated about class based inheritance schemes. I took a look at the Lua API, and it looks like there isn't too much magic happening in the `class` function. Would you advise users against trying to use Polycode in a strictly prototypal manner?

Now there is a new tile and feature stop.

Sounds smart. Reading through the thread, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the number of tile types. Similar to how I reacted to the different features in Portal 2. Each felt far less explored than the portal was just in the first.

I'm having some difficulty running this on OSX. I certainly have java installed. The .jar just barfs an error at me, and I'm not well-versed enough in the Java ecosystem to track down the error in the console. Advice?

You need to turn off short tags in your apache php.ini configuration. The xml declaration is being considered PHP code because of the `<?`. Personally, I think short tags should be off always.

edit:
changed apache -> php.ini

I would follow the advice of the first reply and get rid of that `setInterval` call. Use animationFrames. Once you do that, you can get a sense of what your real framerate is. If it's still not satisfactory, try doing less math in that loop. From the look of it, the stuff you've got in the game loop should easily handle ~60fps. You may want to look at some of your canvas calls. A couple seem to basically be no-ops.

Aqua Kitty to win! Oops no, we didn't get nominated

Seriously though, all competitions are just a bit of fun. Some people win, some don't.


Pixelprospectors own top 80 pick list is pretty nice btw - http://igf.pixelprospector.com/
(but again, no Aqua Kitty! sheesh)

Actually, Aqua Kitty is on the pixelprospector list. Congratulations!

I never really understood the purpose of the full-width horizontal blocks at the beginning of the level. Confusing at first and then they just were annoying since i couldn't see what their purpose was.

Yeah, those are kind of a vestigial thing from an in-game tutorial. I grew somewhat blind to them. I'll remove them or, taking justinfic's advice, place coarser blocks there.

I would welcome the game being larger/easier to see, also the text on the side is sort of hard to read...

I'd tried a fullscreen thing previously, and it was a failure in a few ways. Maybe I'll give it another shot, since you both mentioned that.

Perhaps instead do one initial board, very easy (maybe use giant 3x3 blocks of solid colors) during which the next color you have to hit glows in the playfield. By the end of that, a newbie will have figured it out, and pros can still tear through it and go for speed.

I'm going to give this a try.

Speaking of which, is speed rewarded at all? I find myself going for speed and not for combo, although if both were multiplied that could be really cool.

There is no bonus for speed. In fact at the moment there is kind of a disincentive. I'll try to think of how to grant a time bonus if the combo is maintained.

The grey blocks are way too close in color to open air-- I accidentally ran into them over and over.

I wonder if it's the contrast on my machine or something, because those two colors seem very different. I may drop the whole pulsating thing going on in the empty zone, which certainly doesn't help this problem.

When I bust through and get a reset, and my dude breaks that first block when he lands in the next board my brain *always* thinks that kicks off the color wheel.

Can you think of a way to better communicate that that isn't the case? The timer is gray, and the color hint on the player goes gray as well, but that may not be enough.


Thanks to both of you! I really appreciate the comments.

This game is technically done, but I'm still incorporating feedback into the game, so this seems a better place than Announcements.

RGBuried was inspired by Tetris and Mr. Driller. I wanted to make an interesting puzzle game that was mechanically simple, since this is the first original game I've ever finished.

The goal is to accumulate as many points as possible before falling off of the screen. You do this by breaking as many blocks as possible, and extending your combo for multipliers. You build a combo by breaking blocks in the order dictated on the left side of the screen. It's just the cycle Red -> Green -> Blue -> Red -> ...

Breaking the combo results in a few new lines being dropped onto the top of the screen, pushing you down towards the bottom. If you ever fall of the screen, it's game over.

To prevent you from sitting there and planning the whole route for the screen, there is a timer forcing you to make a move. It gets reset every time a block is broken, and in the process gets shortened a tiny bit as well.

Anyway, the game can be downloaded here:
http://games.evilrobotstuff.com/rgburied/

I'd love to hear what you all think. Thanks.

Signed up for onegameamonth, so at least 12 games this year
Join at team at Global Game Jam
Finally finish something for Ludum Dare
Get my Javascript barely-engine to a good place
Stop being a loner and meet other indie developers