The game was in fact designed with gameplay first. The story was designed around our experience of watching people test the game and being mentors to the players. All of the story comes in bite-sized bits, which rarely feel like a daunting amount of text.

The thing I'm most concerned about is the subtlety of the narrative. If you're only reading every other level's text, or even skimming, you might miss a revelation.

I'm still unsure how the public will perceive this game.

Luna's Wandering Stars a physics puzzle game about a character stuck as the god of a simulation, bored of immortality. The player interests him and he tries to have a real relationship with you, despite it being a one-way communication.

You never see this character; he only communicates through a Turing Test-esque chat. I've seldom seen 2D puzzlers with deep stories, so I have no idea if an audience is even there. On the other hand, I don't know any other game like it, so it might be praised as something new.

I tried to treat the script as literature and I'm worried that gamers don't want that. I'd love to be proven wrong!



http://serenityforge.com/games/lunaswanderingstars.html

Most Twitch content is streamed by people who aren't coders, nor people with extra servers.

I've run streams before for simpler things and have had few problems. This is a new thing people are doing and it's not a simple set-up. I think that that's a valid thing to write about.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TobyLurio/20140306/212510/Its_stupidly_hard_to_make_a_quotTwitch_Playsquot_anything.php

We're considering including an arcade mode with limited lives (gaining extra lives by getting the collectibles), but we don't know if it's worth the time to implement.

Would it change the perceived value of the game?

For the player, games are great for improv! For the developer, not so much.

It would be interesting to see a program that allows developers to quickly improvise. Something like Game Maker, or Unity, but faster to draft and easier to edit the engine itself.

In my game, Luna's Wandering Stars, we're trying to appeal to both new players and the "hardcore". By doing this, we made levels that are easy to beat, but hard to get all the collectibles in.

You can beat the main game without getting any collectibles (collectibles unlock challenge levels), but hardcore players might feel a lack of motivation if they have no interest in challenge levels.

Is there any way to change the difficulty in games with environmental puzzles?

I come from a theater background myself and the similarities are probably the reason I got a job in the first place.

Theater is a multi-media just like video games. All of the lessons I learned about merging disparate elements can be transferred to games.

The only problem with games is that improv is not nearly as good.

I like the typewriter effect when it's showing that a character is actually typing the text.

I also like when it's used with character animations to emote with the text (i.e. Ace Attorney)

I think it works quite well for my game Luna's Wandering Stars, because it has kind of a Turing Test feel. You're not quite sure how real the other participant is.

http://blog.serenityforge.com/

I do a lot of blogging about design, but in a light-hearted way!

Hi, my name is Toby. I'm a playwright/futurist philosopher.

One of the main topics I study is the intersection of technology and art. I've been researching about virtual reality for a while and I'm certain that it's the next step of not just games, but entertainment in general.

I've started to write an immersive play for virtual reality, but I'm not a programmer nor a graphic designer. It's a fairly simple concept; a single unalterable event happen. The player's controls are restricted to movement. The only tricky parts are that I would need to do some kind of motion capture and it would need to be configured for use on the Oculus Rift.

If anyone could help me find my way around this community, it'd be much appreciated.