Thanks :D We will submit the game to the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival and to EGX, let's hope they manage to see its interest
As for the music part, finally I'll wait a bit more before writing about it, since it should evolve quite a lot more as we work on the game!

[Devlog entry]

Devlog entry

No news is good news! Well for us at least, because we were quite busy working on a new demo for a french event that took place last week-end in Paris.

Since last entry, there has been a lot of work on the gameplay code to improve it and make it more modular; most of the wave types are simple attributes that can be combined (when it makes sense of course!), so we already have MANY possibilities to build levels It will take some time just to fully understand and use what we have now, and it's not like we don't have any more idea for other wave types...

We also worked on visuals, the player sprite, the levels background, the waves look... Here are some gifs:


If you look close enough, the player even leaves a trail behind them


Some more wave types we included in our new demo


New respawn effect

There was a lot of work on the sound design as well! Our first prototype used a pentatonic scale for the ambient music, so it wasn't really difficult to pick a fitting sound when a generator was activated or the player changed wave (or really anything else), but for this demo we tried a different system with a looping chord sequence. This way every other sound in the game is picked according to the current chord, and the frequent events (like a wave spawn) generate a kind of melody, following a simple algorithm to chose which note to play. I'll try to upload a video soon, and maybe talk about the system more precisely.

Beside that, and I feel this is ok to speak about it here, I'm still trying to learn how to market, trying things with Twitter and Facebook, with no great success so far (but a few nice articles we're very proud of!). I try to stay sincere, but like many other indie dev I have troubles singing the praises of my own game. I have a lot to learn, but I have good hope that it should be possible to gather some attention without becoming hypocrite or something.

That's it for today! Gonna try to write this article about music generation this week-end and add the game to IndieDB We will also try to push on the narrative side, since it's important for us but we haven't done much about it until now.

Cheers!

Edit: feeling crazy, I'm changing the thread icon to the 20% icon!

If you don't have a community, no contact with people at Apple and no press presence, I'd say it's not very likely.

Congrats \o/

I like the mouse part of your suggestion, it's very much like the touch controls I was thinking of, but I'm a bit less sure about the keys to activate the generators :/ Anyway, we had something a bit in that spirit for the gamepad controls, so we may try it for the keyboard as well, it could be a very good surprise Thanks for the idea!

Wow it's amazingly beautiful '_' I love the technical details about visuals, very inspiring (although I couldn't reapply them)!

Just played the demo, the game looks pretty fun! Actually I have not stop playing it, I just paused to write the post hahaha

Have you thought about making the movement binded on clockwise and counterclockwise direction? So you could just use up and down or left and right.

It reminds me of this game: http://store.steampowered.com/app/367570/oO/

Nice, thanks ^^
We did think about the control scheme you're mentioning, in fact this is the first we tried, and there have already been a lot of discussions with Thaumaturge about it on this thread! This is currently our biggest issue; on one hand, the current controls are the best we could think of in order to have a smooth experience through the game; on the other hand, a LOT of players suggest the clockwise/counterclockwise scheme, thinking it would be better (and with no way to figure out if it really is, since we don't propose it). It would be better indeed for the intuitive aspect, but it is definitely worse for many reasons if applied to the whole game. Yet we can't just ignore it, because players seem to want it quite hard! We will have to figure something out to provide simultaneously the best controls possible AND have the player happy with it!
We did find out about oO a few days after settling for the name oQo. We hope we won't have any trouble about this, mainly because despite the similarities, the goals of the two game are almost opposite (one very fast paced with skill and precision, the other one with relaxation and smoothness as objective).

Ooh, the new art-style looks pretty. Simple, easily-read, but with enough variety that it doesn't look plain, to my eye. ^_^

Thanks ^^ We still have some work to do on that (and we'll have various biomes), but it's good to know we're on the right track!

I really like it! Playing the prototype now. A couple things that might be janky:

When in a position like this at the start of a new screen, I can't move downwards along the circle past the starting position, only up (counter-clockwise). Is that a bug?

And when playing the tutorial, I had my hands on the arrow keys, then when the mouse controls were introduced I had to reposition my hands and discover WASD. Sometimes it's nicer to be all on the keyboard or all on the mouse (or at least know what to expect). I'm playing on a trackpad, which surprisingly seems fine, but the more quick-timey your puzzles get, the more playing on a laptop might suck. Just some audience-type stuff to think about.

Good work! I'm following.

Edit: One more thing, I was playing the prototype without reading any description first, and was able to figure out the controls and mechanics on my own with a few enjoyable "A-ha!" moments like discovering I could traverse the white circles as well as the static ones. So that aspect of discovery is cool!

I don't know if I would choose the word "soothing" to describe the game, though?

Regarding the "stuck situation", maybe it's because you didn't fully understand the control scheme? In a situation like this, the right arrow will do nothing (you are already at the most right point of the wave), the left arrow will make you go to the left (beginning with top or down, depending on your starting point), the up arrow will make you go up, so the only way to be sure you're going down is the down arrow.
If that's the issue, then once again we're back at our control problem! Not explained clearly enough, not intuitive enough, and yet (in our opinion, after a lot of testing) the best possible. For example it's the only one that allow you to go precisely on the most right position on a wave. I feel we still have a lot of work and thinking in order to resolve this issue ^^'
In addition to that, as you said, the game was initially thought for mouse + keyboard, we have added gamepad controls, but we still have to figure things out for other cases, especially trackpads. Not sure what we're gonna do about that, if there's anything that can be done :/
Finally, this prototype may indeed not be as "soothing" as we pretend it to be, but it's (we hope) partly because we tried to condense the experience on a reasonable length. We should have more freedom in the full game to chose the pace and make it more relaxing! Well, that's our goal, now we'll see how it turns out
Thanks for playing and giving feedback!

[Devlog entry]

Devlog entry

We are freezing the prototype! We have spent a lot of time working on it in order to gather quality feedback, and now it's time to start the work on the real, full game, with everything we learned thanks to that prototype

What we did since last build:
    - Full support for gamepad on standalone build (not supported in browser, the build can be downloaded on the same page)
    - Polish on ending
    - Heavily reworked the tuto
    - Several LD tweaks
    - Support for WASD/ZQSD in addition to arrows
    - Lots of thinking and discussions regarding the controls and the future of the game!

The two salons were great, we had lot of players of all ages, and it was fun to see that sometimes the children are better than the grown-ups, probably because they are better at adapting to new situations! Nice thing however to see that even the youngest managed to have fun with the game

The prototype can still be played at the same link: oqogame.com/prototype/

Now with the full game!
We are taking things back a bit in order to have a clean start. Among others, there will be a visual update. We aim to keep the minimalist aspect of the universe, but still add some details here and there. Here is a glimpse of what our artist is working on:



That's it for today, there's a long road ahead of us, but we're quite motivated!

If anybody is in Toulouse or Lyon this week-end, we will be presenting the game at the Toulouse Game Show and the Japan Touch Haru / Geek Zone! So please come say hi if you're around

Hey, thanks for taking the time to give us feedback even if you didn't enjoy the game, it's appreciated Of course we don't expect the game to please everyone, but it's always interesting to gather more opinions! We try to avoid very precise timing requirements, but the game is indeed based on the correct chaining of actions.

Seems like you have a good idea about where to take this project. Looking forward to future updates

We're slowly building our vision, some points are very clear for us, others a bit less We are still at the prototype stage, we want to gather a lot of feedback for it before moving to a full game, and we really take our time.

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, many valid points here!
Never thought about short keyboard, it definitely raises the need to support wasd higher in our priority list! Same for the lack of clarity for the keys of the tutorial.
There is in fact an indication to press the right key when you reach the first "end wave", but it's hidden if you're at the top of the wave, so we're gonna rework that as well.
Regarding the "trial and error" aspect, it's something we want. We try not to make it unpleasant, but it is part of the game to sometimes just try things to see how it turns out, and then retry with the newly acquired knowledge to succeed, since there is no penalty when you respawn.
We have planned to try a mobile version, even if our main focus will probably remain on PC (less constraints, not to say I don't feel like trying to market a mobile game, this is war over there).
Thanks again for playing and taking the time to give us feedback!

I'm not sure at all, but I think you're on a good track for that "alive" feeling with your sketches, maybe if you just round a bit those sharp edges it could change it quite a lot, while still keeping the global cubic aspect. Then when the character rolls, you could curl inside its characteristics (tail, head, wings...), and deploy them again when he stops? (I have a very vague idea how this all works so I may be totally wrong, I just used this technique on a old prototype of mine for a party game, with cute "lizard cubes" (?) that could dash by rolling very fast, all curled up).

Sorry if I have made you waste time with my suggestions ^^' Everything always seem very easy as long as one doesn't start working on it!

I just tried the WebGL demo and the Windows version. Im afraid to say that I could not proceed in any of the versions. The "play button" did not work. So all i had was the inital screen after the Unity logo had been shown (Play button at the top, orange circle in the middle with a water-drop, and text at the bottom).

I might have missed something, but I really tried all the keyboard and controller buttons? And I klicked the water drop. Let me know if a screenshot would help.

Just to be sure, what you call the "play button" is the small grey square with an up arrow in it? If so, it is part of the tutorial. What you describe seem to be the normal start screen, did you include the arrow keys of your keyboard in your tests? They are the ones supposed to allow you to move (wasd/zqsd not supported yet). When you clicked on the drop, did it wobble with a sound? If none of this works, well I'm kind of baffled, especially with the Windows version, I can't see a reason why it wouldn't work (with the WebGL version, well, it would still be weird, but you never know, with all the browsers...). I'll just hope you didn't try the arrow keys ^^' If you did and despite that nothing happened, I would be interested in knowing your setup, even if I'm not sure it will help me a lot!
Thanks for trying anyway

Fair enough! Good luck in finding something that works well! ^_^

Thanks I'll keep this thread updated with our further attempts!

Nice! Now it looks like they kiss

Mmh and you didn't get any error message?
Sometimes it doesn't load because the browser doesn't have anymore memory to allocate to the game (and I'm afraid there isn't much I can do about it while still using Unity), but the user is usually warned about it. I don't think I have ever heard about the game not loading without any warning :/ Do you have a lot of tabs open, or do you keep your browser open for extended periods of time?

The controls look amazing, and I like the backgrounds. However, to be very honest, I'm not totally convinced by the main character, even with the fun walk animation, it still feels like a cube (well, it is a cube). I understand it may not be your goal, but I would be very curious to see that with a more credible character and good animations. (I saw your mockup for an improved character, but all of them still feel very cubic, yet I think it should be possible to have something a lot more alive while still keeping the possibility to make it roll into a vague cubic shape.)

Nice I was indeed suggesting a custom system given the specificities of your system (you only need to know the obstacle distance in a circle around the center point)!

Hey! Just getting around to your previous question:

Unfortunately, I have yet to give the build/demo a shot. Been unbelievably busy with music.

However, it's on my bucket list for the future! Worst case scenario, I play it during its Early Access or release.

Definitely keep me posted if an open beta or anything along those lines take place! You're always welcome to DM, but I'm on these forums fairly regularly; weekly at the very least.

I can understand that Thanks for showing interest!

Such a system would very much call for testing, I daresay--it's hard to say with confidence whether it would be more or less intuitive than the current one.

Well for sure, we have already tried something like 4 or 5 control scheme, but haven't given up yet on finding the perfect one, so there will be a few more fiddlings! Presenting the game on conventions should help us greatly to grasp the expectations of players as well.
The ideal goal would be a scheme that just doesn't require any thought from the user to use, and there might be something like that between our current system and your suggestions.