NEW UPDATE Ahhh it's been a really long time again, so much has happened and Sam is swamped with a crazy amount of stuff to do so I'm going to start updating this thread. My name is Saleem and I help Sam with design stuff as well as doing production work on GNOG.
OKAY FIRST THING, WE MADE A TRAILER
So as you can tell from the video Double Fine is publishing our game, which is honestly a dream come true for us and an amazing fit since GNOG borrows a lot from point and click puzzle games. Secondly it's coming to Playstation 4 with VR support (and Steam and iOS a few months afterwards).
Since we're now officially launching on a console first, we had to get the game feeling really at home with a controller. Almost all cursor driven games on a controller feel kind of janky so we wanted to put extra effort here.
At first we iterated with different ideas like magnetism, cursor sizes, and hot zones/collision sizes. Magnetism seems like a very good idea at first but it turns out to only work really well for UI elements (like in Destiny) and feels kind of annoying when applied to in game interactions. We ended up settling on a simple cursor ring with a big collision box around it and a lot of smoothing:
This was okay to start with but was really lacking in the joy and playfulness we want the game to embody. A while later Sam was playing the excellent
Plug & Play on iOS and noticed an interesting feedback mechanism for when you touch an interactive object:
That sort of lively flowey ring looked like it would translate really nicely to an analog stick and we started imagining ways we could extend it further with custom animations on interactive objects. We wanted it part of the game world itself so it felt like you were controlling a little magical cluster rather than a boring cursor.
Here's our proof of concept, with object specific hover animation on the cube:
This system has the benefit of being powered almost entirely on animations, which lets us create custom reactions depending on the situation and the level. For example if there’s a knob that’s super hot and you try to grab it, the cursor can play a “too hot” animation and turn black, giving it an in-game connection to the world. Since GNOG is all about the physicality of the interactions, incorporating the cursor into the game world makes a lot of sense.
Here’s what it looks like in action in its basic form in the log gnog:
In other news we’re currently putting the finishing touches on our IGF build which means working on the intro, the overworld/level select, and polishing the levels that we currently have. After that we’re switching focus to push PS VR development which is going to introduce a bunch of little design challenges to figure out.
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