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[bsp]

That's awesome, man! Getting valuable feedback is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Alex is also a special treat as he's so cut and dry while being very articulate.

[Juan Raigada]

It's so nice seeing this evolving. I share that feeling of not knowing how good your work is, specially having no previous experience in game-making (I'm in the same boat). Congrats for the coverage.

I wish there was a huge indie community here in Spain, but it's still in it's inception (but growing steadily).

Oh, and I love how the game looks now. I think you are nailing the look!

[William Chyr]

Relativity is featured on Kotaku! Whoo!

http://kotaku.com/relativity-puts-you-in-an-mc-escher-drawing-1525127547

[Christian]

Relativity is featured on Kotaku! Whoo!

http://kotaku.com/relativity-puts-you-in-an-mc-escher-drawing-1525127547

Congrats! Game looks great, especially love the trailer on your site

[William Chyr]

Congrats! Game looks great, especially love the trailer on your site

Thanks so much Christian!

That's awesome, man! Getting valuable feedback is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Alex is also a special treat as he's so cut and dry while being very articulate.

Yeah, it's not always easy to hear critical feedback, but it's great because you know that it's going to result in you making a better game!

It's so nice seeing this evolving. I share that feeling of not knowing how good your work is, specially having no previous experience in game-making (I'm in the same boat). Congrats for the coverage.

I wish there was a huge indie community here in Spain, but it's still in it's inception (but growing steadily).

Oh, and I love how the game looks now. I think you are nailing the look!

Hey Juan, we're definitely experiencing the same emotional roller coaster. Some days, you feel great about the game. Other days, it's like "What in the world am I even doing...". Chicago has been really great for me as there's a healthy indie scene here, but online communities (like TIG) are also super awesome and supportive. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Spain gets a vibrant indie scene.

P.S. You're game looks great, and you should be proud of it!

[William Chyr]

GameZone has chosen Relativity as one of their favorite games from Show & Tell at IndieCade East!

http://www.gamezone.com/previews/2014/02/20/indiecade-east-once-again-shows-off-the-games-you-might-be-playing-next

[Juan Raigada]

GameZone has chosen Relativity as one of their favorite games from Show & Tell at IndieCade East!

http://www.gamezone.com/previews/2014/02/20/indiecade-east-once-again-shows-off-the-games-you-might-be-playing-next

Congrats!!!

[OniWorld]

GameZone has chosen Relativity as one of their favorite games from Show & Tell at IndieCade East!

http://www.gamezone.com/previews/2014/02/20/indiecade-east-once-again-shows-off-the-games-you-might-be-playing-next

Awesome! Glad to see you picking up the press, you deserve it!

[William Chyr]

Thanks so much for the support, guys! Been busy these past few days with getting a demo ready for local playtesting, but will write up an actual development update soon.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #34 - 02/25/2014

Hey guys, been a while since the last devlog update. Got a new set of approaching deadlines for different applications, so have been a bit stressed out and busy with those. Also, the weekend right after IndieCade East, there was another small indie game dev meetup here in Chicago. I spent the few days right up to the meetup implementing a lot of the suggestions and feedback from IndieCade East. From the latest playtesting session, it's definitely an improvement.

One of the biggest design challenges for Relativity has been trying to find a balance between freedom and linearity of the puzzles, and I think I'm finally starting to find the right way to do it.

On the technical side of things, I've started really looking into how the water mechanics in the game would work. To make water fit within the context of the world, it will need to be very constrained and follow a very specific set of rules, so that its behavior will be very predictable to the player. This is because water will be an important role in solving several puzzles, and I can't just have water splashing all over the place.

I'm still not finished with it yet, but just wanted to give you guys a preview of what I've been working on so far.

Here's the first draft of the water system I wrote:



What's happening here is that I start with a game object called the Water Starter. The Water Starter does raycasting in a number of directions (forward, down, left, and right) to determine if anything is there. If there's nothing below it, it will fall down one step, and then re-perform the check. If something is below the water starter, it will check to see if something is in front of it. If there isn't, it will move forward one step, and re-perform the check. At each step of the way, it creates a collider.

It looks pretty good, but it's not what I want from a technical standpoint. There are simply way too many colliders that are created, and also, it isn't responsive to environmental changes. So, for example, if the ground were to be removed at certain point for whatever reason, the water would remain in place, which is not what I want.


Here's the second draft:


What I'm doing here is looking for changes in the blocking situation, for example if the water starter detects that there's now no ground beneath it, it signals a state change. What I do then, is that I use the starting and ending positions to get a midpoint, and a distance between the points, and create one single collider. It doesn't look as good as the previous version, since the colliders just pop into place, but from a technical standpoint, it's closer to what I have in mind.

Here's the third draft:


As you can see, I've started the check if there's something in front, to the right or left of the water starter, and react accordingly, thus creating bends in the water. Also, in this version, each subsequent segment of the waterfall is actually a child of the previous segment. This way, if the source of the waterfall gets cut off, or if something changes higher up in the waterfall, all the subsequent segments will be affected.

Still quite a lot of work to do, but I'm celebrating the small victories for now.

[Juan Raigada]

 

This just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

[William Chyr]

This just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

Ha, yeah. This water stuff might be the biggest technical challenge so far...

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #35 - 02/26/2014

Water System

Ok, I'm finally getting somewhere with the water branching system:



Writing this system was pretty painful due to the debugging process. The water system uses a recursive function, so that the water segment just keeps replicating itself. This is necessary as the water will need to respond dynamically to environmental changes, so each subsequent segment of the water is just a brand new water source, embedded within the previous water segment.

As anyone who was written a recursive function knows, if you mess up the code, you can get yourself caught up in an infinite loop. Every time this happened, Unity would freeze, and I'd have to ctrl + alt + delete out of it. This made the entire process extremely tedious.

I did eventually figure out what the main bug was. In Unity, it looks like if you have a prefab, and your instantiate itself and add a child to that object, then instantiate it again, the second instance will actually include a child as well. This was causing an additional water starter to get created, which then increased the number of gameobjects exponentially with each subsequent update.

Experimental Gameplay Workshop
Heard back from the organizers of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC. Sadly, Relativity didn't make the cut this year. However, I'll look at it as motivation to work harder, and will definitely try again next year.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #36 - 02/28/2014

The main design challenge I'm working on is the water mechanics in Relativity. Specifically, what are the rules of its behavior. Because this is a puzzle game that's heavy on logic, the behavior of the water needs to be really predictable. Think of it as the light bridges from Portal 2, except they respond to gravity. I need the player to be able to plan out everything in their head, knowing that if the water falls off here and hits that, exactly which direction it will go.

I'm planning on introducing the L-Shaped blocks later in the game that lets the player bend streams of water. Below is my thought process for deciding how water should behave in Relativity. Please excuse the crudeness of the drawings. These are all from a top-down perspective.

When you place the L-shaped block this way, you bend the water stream to the left (the water's left). The arrows indicate the direction of the water.


And when you place the L-shaped block the other way, you bend the water stream to the right (the water's right).


These are the basic starting rules.

So then, what happens when water approaches a block like this (perhaps 2 normal blocks placed side by side)?


There are three options.

1) water splits and continue in their new directions:


This seems logical enough, if not a tad bit unrealistic. However, the problem here is that it renders the L-shaped blocks useless. Why choose one direction, when you can basically get 2? It also makes the puzzles way to easy, since you don't really need to think of how to redirect the stream, you can just keep splitting it bidrectionally until you've got the stream you need.

2) water splits, but then continues in original direction:


Ok, so then water happens after the block? Do the streams re-merge into one?


or continue as two separate and independent streams?


The problem with keeping the 2 separate streams is that one of the streams is pretty much useless. It doesn't add anything to the puzzle, since the other stream is going in the same direction and is right beside it.

The problem with water re-merging is, what if I have a much wider obstacle, which can be formed by players putting multiple regular blocks in a row.

If it's really wide, it would look weird for water to continue in the original direction:


This seems more natural, but I'm back to my original problem of creating bidirectional streams and making the puzzle solving to easy:


This leads me to the final option:

3) stopping the stream:


It's not the most realistic option. However, it solves a lot of the problems with the earlier options. For one, it's really predictable. You know if you don't have an L-Shaped block lined up correctly, the water will just stop. Also, it doesn't allow the player to create bidirectional streams. So, I think this is the option I'm going to go with.

What do you guys think? Of course, this doesn't handle all the cases. For example, what if the block is shifted and only touches half the stream? I haven't worked this out now, but these are just the basics of the water behavior rules.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #37 - 03/03/2014

Wow. Can't believe it's already March. I'm now entering the 16th month of full-time development. When I started this project back in November 2012, I actually thought I'd be done in 3 months...

  <-- my current self laughing at my past self.


Anyway, after a very unproductive week and lots of trial-and-error programming, I am finally getting somewhere with the water stuff in the game:



It's probably the ugliest-looking water stream around, but I'm just happy it's flowing. I have enough game development experience now to know that everything starts out looking terrible, so it's only going to get better from here.

Also, just want to share that Relativity is in the latest issue of the TIGSource DevLog Magazine! Special thanks to Bandreus for reviving the magazine!

[bsp]

Looking good, man! You have me curious as to what water mechanics might imply.

[OniWorld]

Getting water to look right can be a massive chore in games, I guess because water is natural thing. Congrats on getting in the devlog magazine! I remember I was working on a game a long time ago under a different account (so many lost passwords), and that got featured on the Tumblr and devlog magazine. Really boosted my inspiration, you're bossing it!

[Juan Raigada]

Wow. Can't believe it's already March. I'm now entering the 16th month of full-time development.

that's impressive. I have just started full time two months ago and it's a very different rhythm to settle on.

[OniWorld]

Wow. Can't believe it's already March. I'm now entering the 16th month of full-time development.

that's impressive. I have just started full time two months ago and it's a very different rhythm to settle on.

I haven't been able to work on my game fulltime yet, but I do fulltime freelance web/game work from home. Recently I've been losing motivation, sleeping in and not getting as much done, and it feels different to general burn out. Have you guys experienced that yet? Trying to overcome this procrastination hurdle...

[William Chyr]

Looking good, man! You have me curious as to what water mechanics might imply.

Thanks! I haven't shared too much about the role of water in terms of gameplay, but if I can get it right, it will definitely be the coolest part of the game.

Think of the water here as a a cross between the light bridges and lasers of Portal, with gravity applied. The rule behind the core mechanic is that if you're not on one gravity field, that gravity becomes inactive, and all the objects associated with that field freeze. So if we extend that rule to water, then water in a particular gravity field would also freeze when you're on another gravity. This means that you can then use waterfalls as bridges to connect different areas.

There's a lot of interesting things that emerge from this property, which I haven't totally thought through yet. For example, what if you can use frozen water from one gravity as a wall to change the direction of water from another gravity field?

I'm still unclear about a lot of technical/design details regarding the water mechanics, but I really think that if I can pull it off successfully, it will be really mindblowing.