[love-driven platformer]

Hey everyone!
The Kickstarter campaign for a project I'm working on just launched yesterday and I thought this would be a great place to share it.

Vokabulantis is a love-driven platformer inspired by games like Inside, Unravel and Little Nightmares.

Join Kurt and Karla in their struggle to restore peace to Vokabulantis - and to express their feelings for each other after their words have been taken away.

Check out the KICKSTARTER PAGE

We just announced a release date!
Altered is coming out March 12th 2021.

[Altered]

So the game is close to done, AND we launched a new demo of Altered on Steam as part of the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition!

Go check it out HERE

Finally an update!
The game has gone through A LOT of iterations since our last update and we've finally hit something that we see as shippable.

Here are the first to levels of the game.

More updates to come very soon!

This looks really cool!
How do you switch between the different curves and make sure that the right one is followed when jumping between multiple levels?

Are you just using triggers with box colliders to find the current curve to follow?

This looks great! I like the art style - especially the water/waves. The music in the trailer is quite lovely too. Who's your musician?

Thank you! :-)

The music was made by Jonas Kappel

[MAY UPDATE 2 - Better water, new models and animation system]

MAY UPDATE 2 - Better water, new models and animation system

A lot has happened in the last week or so, so I thought that we might as well post another update.

We've been selected for Yonderplay at the Nordic Game Conference in Sweden next month and have to prepare a playable demo of the game.
Therefore we've been focused on stability and visuals.

Better water

The water in the beach world was already looking okay, but it was still not what we wanted it to be, so we put in some time, looked at water shader tutorials and ended up with a look that we really like.

We added vertex animations with gerstner waves which gave the water some life. If anyone is interested, Catlike Coding has some really nice tutorials here.
By sampling the depth buffer of the scene, we were able to give the water some better depth coloring and used it to detect where the foam should be.
The foam look is achieved by sampling a perlin noise texture and offsetting that with some distortion over time.

This is what we ended up with



New end tile

In each puzzle we have a end/goal-tile that the player has to reach to finish it and until now it has been a flat-looking grey block that didn't really look like much.
We felt like it had to be more noticeable for the player and wanted it to blend in with the game more.
After looking at games like Archaica and Lara Croft Go we came up with something completely different:



(The speed of the gif is a little too fast, but you get the idea :-) )

To animate the tile we had to implement our own animator component and animation system, since we hadn't had the need for anything like that until now.
This was luckily easy to implement with our scene/entity-systems and we were able to get it working with the features we needed without any issues.

[MAY UPDATE]

MAY UPDATE

What we've been doing

First of all we've added a better undo-system.
Every action/command is now added to an undo state and can be easily reversed.
Before we saved the whole level state and replaced it when the player pressed undo, which wasn't optimal for memory. As seen below we also added the option to hold down the UNDO-button to go through the undo stack.



And as we also mentioned in the april update, we were about to redo the overworld selection screen.

This was before:


And this is how it looks now:


We think it's much more readable and the new layout makes for better level progression.

Let us know what you think!

On the more technical side we've had some issues with performance on MacOS and integrated graphics generally,
so we've been focusing a lot on that and found a graphics driver issue that made the fps go from 20 to 60 on some macbooks. So hopefully the minimum requirements will be a lot lower than we initially feared.

Looks cool!
Reminds a little of MineRalph

Looks awesome!
Really wanna play it, when you have a demo ready. 

[APRIL UPDATE]

APRIL UPDATE

Steam wishlisting is now enabled!
Wishlist it here!

What we've been doing
We were at Reboot Develop in Dubrovnik, Croatia last week, which was a blast! I can't recommend that conference enough.

We're looking into optimizing the game, so it'll be able to run on as many machines as possible.
The undo system has been revamped to support endless undos. This was not possible before, since every undo had the whole level state saved, which ate too much memory.
We're gonna implement a new progression system for the overworld.
Right now the overworld is a graph of levels like this



What we want is a grid-based system with level numbers like "Baba Is You" does it.

[What is Altered?]

What is Altered?
Altered is a meditative puzzle game mixing hard puzzles and a soothing atmosphere.
Explore a mysterious world filled with challenging puzzles solving them by altering your characters in multiple ways, forcing you to think outside the box.



When will it release?
March 12th 2021

What platforms?
Windows, Mac and Linux

@playaltered
@drainyard
@themeshpotato

Play the demo and wishlist the game!

Steam
Itch.io


UPDATES
1 - April: Wishlisting, undo system and new level progression system
2 - May update 1: New undo-system and level progression
3 - May update 2: Better water, new models and animation system
4 - 2020 update 1: A brand new demo and almost ready for release

[We are now looking for alpha testers!]

We are now looking for alpha testers!

Sign up here if you want to try out the game and give us some feedback!
The game is still in an early stage so the more feedback the better!
We'll be sending out Steam test keys in a couple of weeks.

[/center]

I'm maybe 5-6 levels in and just realized it will probably be a lot easier to talk about the levels if you put a number for each level maybe in the top left of the screen.

That's a great idea. I will add a level number to the screen in the next build!

Also a way to go back a level. I think I found a way to bypass part of the challenge on the third ice level since I only used part of the level but can't go back to that level without playing through the game again from what I can tell. Thanks! Nice game.

Yeah, I will put a level selection menu into the game that will make it easier to backtrack!

Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you liked it!

This is a super nice game :D
I love the idea, it works really well
for now I'm stuck at the third ice level

Wow, thanks! It really means a lot

I'm currently experimenting with a new direction where you have to connect the rune cube with other black cubes to solve the puzzles in a similar way, but I'm not sure if that would kill the fun :/ It would replace the stretching part.

[The new version can be downloaded right here!]

So I have been updating the visuals and added some more mechanics and levels.
The new version can be downloaded right here!

Read the original post for the controls.

Damnit
Sorry about that :-( So you unzipped the the files and launched the exe from that?
What are your specs?

Sorry about that! The link should work now! :-)

[glowing green tile]

So the idea of the game is simple: Reach the glowing green tile with the cube marked with the symbol to solve each puzzle.

You move with the ARROW-KEYS and use SPACE to stretch or activate a different power.

There are different symbols with each of their power that change how the puzzles can be solved.

We are looking for alpha testers!

Sign up here if you want to try out the game and give us some feedback!
The game is still in an early stage so the more feedback the better!
We'll be sending out Steam test keys in a couple of weeks.

[COMBAT IMPROVEMENTS AND RUNE STONES]

COMBAT IMPROVEMENTS AND RUNE STONES

COMBAT
As mentioned in the last devlog our main focus has been combat for the last week.
We bumped up health and damage of both enemies and this resulted in harder fights and required more focus of the player.





Without more than one attack for the enemies the combat still feels a bit predictable in the wrong way, so we're working on getting more animations in there and making the attacks even more telegraphed.

RUNE STONES
Another new feature are rune stones. Mechanically they give the player a choice to destroy or activate them.


Destroying the rune stone will give the player more fragments that can be used to purchase items/upgrades from NPCs/shops that can be found in the game.


Activating gives the player an upgrade point that can be used to upgrade health or strength. However, getting the upgrade also means having to give up some health for strength or some strength for health.

We've also talked about having different rune stones with different upgrade-types, but we'll talk more about that later!

NEXT UP
As we're still learning to do pixel art while developing this game we're constantly improving the designs and animations.
That's why we'll be working on adding new attack animations to the player.
We're also working on adding ladders and will probably start doing simple level generation next!