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[tsameti]

Hello. I am working on a game with three other people in our spare time. Real simple stuff, a platformer with a marble on a moving level.

http://tsameti.blogspot.com/2010/06/deceptiworld-progress.html

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We are using Unity3D, which proves to be very easy to pick up and figure out. Moreover, it saves a terribly huge amount of dev time, really simplifies things.

We did rewrite some of the Physics interactions rather than using Unity standard, just to give us a little more freedom. It really helped.

9/18/10: The latest beta of the game is now online. Get excited.
http://www.tsameti.com/dw_game.html

9/28/10: Some of the controls have been tweaked for level 2, the camera and controls have been tweaked for level 3. Still plenty of work that can be done, but it looks much better.

[ortoslon]

i want to playtest, where do i download the file?

[tsameti]

Hey Ortoslon,

Do you mind telling me which platform you use? There's a build up on Googlecode, but it's Unity Web player, which we have not optimized for.

I'll need to compile you another.

[ortoslon]

windows xp sp3

i found the build on google code, it's a .unity3d file, i can't run it because i don't have unity installed. why not just embed it on a webpage and link here to let people try it?

[tsameti]

Sneaky monkey, lol.

We don't have a website up yet, that's the primary difficulty we're facing right now. Plus the game isn't coded to be a web version, all the menus and proportions break when the window isn't the right size. (Probably easy to fix, admittedly)

No matter what version the game is in, Unity player is a free download that you need to open Unity games.

We're trying to get on top of the website, in the meantime, I'm going to post up a Windows build on googlecode.

[tsameti]

Well, progress on Deceptiworld has gone dark because my computer has been incapacitated. However, there's quite a bit working so far.

Eventually, Deceptiworld is a 3D game intended to offer four 'levels' which pit the player to navigate a jumping marble along a moving set of objects. Each level contains its own quirk which changes the way the player approaches survival.

There are three levels which are functioning at least at the bare bones mechanical sense that we expect, and two of those are justifiably playable and interesting in their own right.

Here's a screen shot of the Plates level in action:


The Plates level is comprised of a field of square pads which move in randomly (smart) generated choreographed actions of swaps, spins, slips, and drops. Although the current win condition is 'survive as long as you can', our plans are to implement a more aggressive mechanic to keep players on their toes.
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New to the game is the starry road level (I need to get someone to compile the latest build for me so that I can take screenshots, grrrr...):

The starry road is comprised of a string of hexagonal pads that form a path through the stars, where the principle difficulty is navigation and illumination.


Please feel free to try the June build of Deceptiworld for either Mac or PC. The game requires the free Unity Player to run, and unfortunately does not contain a functional hex level yet.

I hope that I can get you guys an up to date build soon!

[tsameti]

August builds are up!

And I've got a video that shows the state that the game is in. Sorry, I need to get a better freeware video cap application. Anyway, the game requires the download of the free Unity3D player but it does play on Mac or PC.





Really would love to get input. Levels 2 and 3 are playable, level 1 is going to get a total overhaul, and level four is slated to get diabolically more complicated in the near future.

[tsameti]

There is now a beta build up.

Find it at www.tsameti.com/dw_game.html

I want to apologize in advance for the sound effects, they're placeholders and can get annoying. There's a lot of room for improvement, but it's about time we got some input from you!

You need to download Unity Player before you play. It's free, so nothing to stop you!

Known issues:
Camera problems in the plates level
High Scores require mouse click, the game should be entirely played with keyboard
High Scores may not save
radial motion in Classic stage is difficult at steep angles
Goodness we need music
quit menu option should return player to main menu

few other things

[increpare]

To my fingers, in this game absolute movement is really not suited to keyboard controls - having the camera fixed to the ball and have left/right be rotate might simplify things a lot for some of the levels.

Falling between the tiles in the middle level is frustrating.

The third level I liked, though the controls made it feel a bit awkward.

The 'restart level'/'select level' ui seemed a bit weird.

The classic level is very dark - whole areas of it are totally black for me (this might be due to the strange color-profiles of mac displays though - and feels a bit too zoomed out -

I'm not particularly interested in the premise of the stages - to stay alive as long as possible, but I was happy to hop about on them for a bit.

[flavio]

It's fun!! Congrats! Two things I dislike:

• in fullscreen mode, you maintain the cursor during the game (if it's useless you can hide it);
• in fullscreen mode, menu remains on screen.

[tsameti]

Excellent, thanks for playing.

We'll look into lighting, the camera/control relationship, ui improvements, and what we can do to give you a goal in levels 1 and 3.

[tsameti]

So, a couple of things that have frustrated us: Unity (naturally) doesn't have write access online unless it submits a request to a php script. And the way we've been handling high score is to use a single text file holed up in the same directory. That won't be terrible to figure out. I hope?

The whole point of this project has always been to put it on a mobile device, but in the meantime it needs to be finished online. The fun part about that is, for a mobile, the interface should be all touch screen, and on the web the player should never be forced to switch from mouse to keyboard.

At some point we're going to have to set the interface in different directions, and tweak at the UI for each.

The sound is also crucial. We're using placeholders now, but pitch perfect sound effects go so far to validate success in a simple game like this.

[rogerlevy]

Hey, if you're ever looking for a PHP coder and have a budget, I could handle that stuff for you, at a modest rate. 

[tsameti]

Oh, cool. Thanks for the offer but this is a first project for some of us, so we're not getting money involved if we can.

I saw you're putting together your own game dev environment/engine? Tools dev is way too crucial, much cred to you.

[rogerlevy]

Well, just thought I'd offer.  If you think you're going to make money off the project down the line, I might be open to working on a royalty basis...

On the tools dev comment, thanks.  It's a lot of work, but hopefully it'll pay off.