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[William Chyr]

@sSuite
Heh. Long screenshot. Love that. I should definitely have a bunch of perfectly looping gifs on the site.

@Desiderata
So glad to hear you got to play it at Radius and enjoyed it! Wish I could have been there in person.

Connor
Well, you know, Connor, it's not like commas cost very much, so, I just use them pretty freely, like this, and this.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #66 - 06/27/2014

Finally getting back into designing new puzzles. Change of pace is very different. Instead of making minor tweaks here and there, I'm now just playing around with new mechanics and seeing what's possible.

Often, the way I approach designing a puzzle is that I'll have a rough idea of something I want to try, I'll start by setting up the level, and see if I can solve it. I've often surprised myself with this technique, finding solutions for puzzles that I thought were impossible. From there, I'll start to trim away the unnecessary parts until the core idea is in place.

Here are some work-in-progress pictures of the new levels. Once I have a sequence of puzzles lined up, I will start playtesting.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #67 - 06/30/2014

Continuing to play around with the new mechanics and come up with puzzle ideas. I think my current ratio of good puzzle to bad puzzle is something like 1:6. Lots of puzzles that I think are really cool, but turn out either to be extremely tedious to solve, or there's another, much simpler solution that's already been shown in another puzzle.

I'm hoping to get a series of at least 8 really good, solid puzzles that explore this mechanic. At this rate, I'll have to make at least 48 puzzles first...

Anyway, playtested at a local game developer meetup this past weeekend, and got some good feedback regarding the order in which these puzzles should be presented.

[noumenus]

Wow this has really come a long way. I like the sort of "blue print" look of objects that are far away in some of these shots

[William Chyr]

@noumenus

Hey noumenus! Haven't seen you in this thread in a while now. Nice to hear from you again!

Yeah, been plugging away at the game these last several months. The new look is definitely the most significant development. People are no longer describing the game as generic, so that's good.

[Connor]

Connor
Well, you know, Connor, it's not like commas cost very much, so, I just use them pretty freely, like this, and this.
[/quote]

didnt mean to offend :L

[William Chyr]

@Connor

None taken! 

[mushbuh]

~ i want to hang out and throw large cubes at things in a tiled room ~
keep up the good work willy

[William Chyr]

~ i want to hang out and throw large cubes at things in a tiled room ~
keep up the good work willy

Now that is some solid back-of-the-box quote right there.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #68 - 07/04/2014

I've put together a build of the game consisting of a sequence of 9 puzzles with a new mechanic.



It's ugly and buggy, but the goal right now is just to have something together so that I can playtest and figure out which puzzles are actually interesting and which ones are boring or tedious.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #69 - 07/06/2014

Last week, I watched this GDC Talk by Richard Lemarchand in which he goes over the difference between attention and immersion, and different playtesting techniques they used during his time at Naughty Dog to address problems. I highly recommend giving it a view.

One of the topics that Lemarchand discusses is that there are different kinds of player attention, and regardless of which one, if the games keeps requiring the same kind of attention, players will become bored. This is one reason why games like Skyrim work so well, they allow you to vary between really intense fights in dungeons and open exploration in the outdoors, as well as obsessively sorting your inventory.

I had sort of known this working on my game, and had tried to vary the different kinds of puzzles I was presenting. However, all these puzzles utilized "executive attention", and didn't really offer player much in the way of rest or reward.

I've been seeing symptoms of this, mostly with playtesters getting to be rather tired when they entered the second hub. Also, someone at PAX East told me that while they enjoyed the game very much, when they got to the second hub, their first thought was "Not another one of these places again".

I think the problem is that after players solved the first hub level, instead of giving them a reward of any sort, I simply throw them straight into the second hub level, where it is even bigger and has even more challenging puzzles.

Watching Lemarchand's talk, I realized I actually needed to have a break in between these two hubs. I've thus decided to include a hub that doesn't have any puzzles, and is more of a nature/garden area, where players can calm down, relax, and enjoy the scenery.

I started putting some rough ideas down in the engine today. It's very far from finished, and is honesty quite a mess, but my plan is to get this into the game ASAP so I can playtest, and see if having a nature area between the two puzzle hubs help to combat puzzle fatigue.







I think it's a little too cluttered at the moment,  but it's a start. Waterfalls would also help with the mood a lot, but I still need to finish writing the code for that...

[Christian]

Have you played NaissanceE? Besides the atmosphere, what I felt that game did so well is how it subtly guided the player. The game's linear (well there are more open areas, but it's linear progression), but it doesn't feel that way. The game entices the player with weird and intriguing architecture and structures far away and then later, you exit a corridor and you're there. It's a great feeling, that makes the game seem less like a linear adventure and more a journey where you're discovering the path. It subtly drives the player forward with cues in the environment and the reward of new areas to explore. Really well done

[William Chyr]

@Christian:

I have actually not played NaissanceE yet, but it's on my list for sure. The visuals and architecture in that game look incredible. I've been a little hesitant because I've read that there are a lot of difficult platforming elements, involving jumping in first-person, which I've never been good at.

However, I think the atmosphere and viusals alone are worth it, so I should definitely check it out.

[chris wade]

Does your edge detection happen as an image effect or is it per object? Twitter got me curious earlier

[William Chyr]

Does your edge detection happen as an image effect or is it per object? Twitter got me curious earlier

It's an image effect. I  used to the default edge-detection shader that comes with Unity Pro as a starting point, and then tweaked the actual algorithm a whole bunch.

[William Chyr]

DevLog Update #70 - 07/10/2014

I finally integrated the garden/nature area into the actual game.

I didn't really have an idea for how the level would be laid out when I first started. I began by putting random geometry in place, and then started to walk around the level to see how it felt. Then I started to make adjustments all over the place until it began to feel right.

The whole process took about 5 days. It's now much more organized.

I'm planning to playtest it this weekend and next week to see how it holds up.

For comparison, below are some shots of the level from the beginning of the week when I first started working on the level, and some shots of what the level looks like now.

Before:







After:

[deab]

Looks great and a very enjoyable log.

[William Chyr]

Looks great and a very enjoyable log.

Thanks, deab!

[Tanner]

Really liked seeing this in person at MGDS yesterday! I'm looking forward to playing the finished product someday.

[William Chyr]

Really liked seeing this in person at MGDS yesterday! I'm looking forward to playing the finished product someday.

Thanks for checking it out at MGDS! Appreciate it.