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[TonyManfredonia]

Effective tutorials are huge, so kudos to you on taking so much time to perfect it!

Can't wait to give it a go, myself

[Thaumaturge]

That was an interesting read--thank you for so sharing the development of your tutorial. ^_^

The tutorial puzzles that you showed look rather effective and elegant, I think--especially your solution for teaching the "not" gate.

I might suggest having the buttons remain distinct from their bases when active (perhaps via an outline), so that it's a little bit clearer that they are still manipulable.

As to subsequent logic gates, I'm inclined to be cautious: the functions of subsequent gates may well be easily guessed at from their behaviour--but then I say that as somewhat already familiar with logic gates. Will someone without that knowledge figure them out easily? It's perhaps worth testing.

[RbdJellyfish]

Thank you both for the kind words :D

I might suggest having the buttons remain distinct from their bases when active (perhaps via an outline), so that it's a little bit clearer that they are still manipulable.

Definitely, this is something I plan on doing in the future I've been pretty lazy with the button visuals, but I plan on adding sfx/animations as well as what you're suggesting. Definitely a good idea to show that you can press them again to turn them off.

As to subsequent logic gates, I'm inclined to be cautious: the functions of subsequent gates may well be easily guessed at from their behaviour--but then I say that as somewhat already familiar with logic gates. Will someone without that knowledge figure them out easily? It's perhaps worth testing.

Exactly, it'll probably be a decision I'll have to make based on testing rather than trying to just think things through. I did have someone unfamiliar with logic gates play a medium-level puzzle involving one of the untaught gates, and they managed just fine (even telling me they had a lot of fun with it). This is just one person, though, and I'm not sure if they were able to solve the puzzle because they understood how the gate worked, or if they were just going off the feedback of the output wires. Judging by their playstyle and thought process, I think it was more of the former, but I'm still not sure.

I'd normally be okay with just letting people figure things out as they go without fully understanding all the moving parts if they're still having fun with it, but there are going to be some puzzles later on involving these gates where formulating a plan in your head before going to execute it will be a good idea. It's hard to formulate a plan if you don't completely understand how all the pieces work...

[Thaumaturge]

Thank you both for the kind words :D

My pleasure, for my part. ^_^

Definitely, this is something I plan on doing in the future I've been pretty lazy with the button visuals, but I plan on adding sfx/animations as well as what you're suggesting. Definitely a good idea to show that you can press them again to turn them off.

Aah, fair enough; as long as it doesn't significantly impact these early play-tests, I won't gainsay leaving polish for later!

I did have someone unfamiliar with logic gates play a medium-level puzzle involving one of the untaught gates, and they managed just fine (even telling me they had a lot of fun with it). This is just one person, though, and I'm not sure if they were able to solve the puzzle because they understood how the gate worked, or if they were just going off the feedback of the output wires. Judging by their playstyle and thought process, I think it was more of the former, but I'm still not sure.

Well, it's a promising first data-point at least, I think: nothing to draw solid conclusions on, but an encouraging start. ^_^

[RbdJellyfish]

Update 7 (3/23/17): Open World

Small update

I decided to take all the different areas I've built so far and start putting them together into one complete map. Here's a top down view of what I've completed so far.



The upper area is the start, blue is hearing, yellow is sight, and green is smell. Taste (purple) is in progress, and I haven't started the touch area yet (red).

Speaking of taste, here's what the outside of the level looks like so far.





The world so far is pretty bare-bones. I've been trying to think of different things I can add to make the world more interesting to explore (i.e. landmarks, secrets, etc.). I'm not an artist though, so adding detail to the world could be a challenge. I've also been trying to figure out what to add past the world's playable edge. Water? A wasteland? Floating geometry so it looks like the world is falling apart? Just make it one giant cliffside? Lots of things I can try, I guess.

That's all for later, though. Right now I'm focusing heavily on gameplay completion. My goal right now is to have the game playable from start to finish by the end of the year. That's not to say I'll have the whole game done by then (still gotta do stuff like menus, an art pass, bugfixes, further iteration of the levels themselves, etc.), but I'm aiming to have a baseline game that I can focus on improving.

[Thaumaturge]

Good luck on meeting that goal! I hope that you make it. ^_^

[RbdJellyfish]

Update 8 (6/13/17): Not Dead

Wanted to drop in quick and say I haven't posted in a while but I'm not dead. Work has been crazy so I haven't had much time to work on Sensorium I've done a little bit of stuff worth mentioning, but it's still in progress, so no screenshots/samples yet.

• Started the touch area, the last of the 5 main areas I need for gameplay "completeness". I have a game mechanic and some puzzles planned, and although the puzzles themselves feel pretty fun, the mechanic itself doesn't really feel like "touch" that much. I might try to think of something else.
• Started thinking about the soundtrack and laying down some tunes. Been going for something super chill as to not get in the way of the gameplay, but I'm hoping to make the music memorable as well. Like something people can feel nostalgic about if they hear it in a few years. I'm also trying to elicit that feeling in the short term; for example, people might spend a couple hours solving puzzles in one area, then finally break through and complete it, returning to the outside hub. I'm hoping that hearing the overworld tune upon leaving an area will cause some people to feel a sort of relaxation/relief after thinking their way through a challenging section.
• Started thinking about doing an art pass, and what kind of assets I'll need to make to enhance the visuals of the world. I was recently in touch with an artist friend, and it sounds like we've struck a sort of trade (I'm going to help him program a UE4 add-on for the asset store, and he's going to make some 3D assets for my game).

[Thaumaturge]

Regarding "touch", one suggestion might be to use feedback on the player's mouse-movements: speaking for myself, I find that there's a certain sense of tactility when mouse-motion is affected by outside forces, such as the cursor object hitting a "wall", or a "wind" pushing it aside. (I'm using something similar in a minigame intended for my own project.)

I hope that things go well with your artist-friend! ^_^

[RbdJellyfish]

Update 9 (9/5/17): Implementing Feedback

So I've been working on the touch area on and off. Here's a screenshot from a while ago I never posted.



I'm finding this area pretty tedious to work on, plus it's the biggest area so far, so I've been pretty slow with it. Dunno if I'm gonna make it to my "gameplay complete" draft by the end of the year, but it should still be possible.

I decided to finally get some less biased feedback on the game and show it to a few non-family/friends at a game dev meetup. Overall I think people liked it, despite a few glaring design issues that came up. Although a lot of the issues that came up were things I knew about/was already trying to figure out how to fix, the feedback I got was pretty useful. When I'm too bored to work on the touch area, I've been going back and doing a bit of a gameplay design pass using that feedback.

Also, here's a somewhat updated top-down view of the map so far.

[Thaumaturge]

Interesting--if you don't mind sharing, what feedback did you get from those game-devs, and what solutions do you have?

[RbdJellyfish]

Interesting--if you don't mind sharing, what feedback did you get from those game-devs, and what solutions do you have?

It was a lot of pretty specific stuff, like:

Problem: "This puzzle introduced new mechanics and it's too complex for that"
Solution: Adding a room beforehand that introduces the "new" mechanic more clearly.
Side note: The "new" is in quotes because it's a mechanic that was introduced before and gave them no problems, it was just visually different, so they thought it was new. I agree with them about it not being clear enough though.

Problem: "Having to click each ingredient one by one in the taste area is tedious"
Solution: I've removed the reticle animation so it feels more responsive, but it still feels like a very temporary fix. I've thought about just showing the taste icon above each ingredient instead of forcing you to click on it, but again, that feels like it goes against the spirit of the sense it's representing. Plus it would remove a memory component from each of the puzzles that makes each one a bit more interesting imo.

Problem: "I've had to walk up and down this really long hallway a few times and it feels really slow"
Solution: Surprise, removing the hallway and using the space more efficiently

Problem: "This area feels uninspired"
Solution: Part of me sees where they're coming from, but I feel like this might just be personal opinion. I'm not expecting everyone to like every area in the game when all the game mechanics are so different. So, I'm not sure yet if I should try to do better in this area or just move on.

Problem: "This thing looks ugly/bland/etc."
Solution: I haven't done an art pass yet

[Romain Rope]

Following !

[Thaumaturge]

It was a lot of pretty specific stuff, like:

...

Ah, I see, and thank you for sharing that. ^_^

As to feedback that an area seems uninspired, perhaps it might help to ask for detail on how it feels uninspired: Does something seem cliche? Tedious? Like busywork? Just not an interesting space to navigate? That might help you to figure out what may want for further work in that section.

[afender7]

This looks cool. I haven't read everything, because I'd like to not spoil everything, but that idea for a mechanic based on the sense of taste seems neat. I can't wait to play it some day!

[RbdJellyfish]

This looks cool.

Following !

Thank you!

As to feedback that an area seems uninspired, perhaps it might help to ask for detail on how it feels uninspired: Does something seem cliche? Tedious? Like busywork? Just not an interesting space to navigate? That might help you to figure out what may want for further work in that section.

I realized I didn't mention that this particular comment came from just one person. It was in the hearing area, and they felt like it didn't showcase a very interesting progression of the mechanic, which kinda clashes with how other playtesters feel about it (unless those playtesters are lying). They also felt like it was too much like the sound puzzles in The Witness, but like I mentioned before, my goal was to take what I liked from games that did sound puzzles and improve them, versus just coming up with another completely unique mechanic. They were suggesting an overhaul of the whole area, but maybe I can think of ways to make the progression less... subtle, I guess? Maybe I just need more playtesters and opinions

[Thaumaturge]

I realized I didn't mention that this particular comment came from just one person. It was in the hearing area, and they felt like it didn't showcase a very interesting progression of the mechanic, which kinda clashes with how other playtesters feel about it (unless those playtesters are lying).
...

Ah, fair enough; thank you for clarifying! ^_^

In that case, it may just be a minority perception. I imagine that the matter is well worth exploring, but if more testers are in favour of the experience than aren't then it might not be a major issue.

I will say that I can see that for some, encountering a pre-existing mechanic might feel uninspired if it comes after a series of novel ones. Perhaps it might help to find some twist or novel application of the sound puzzles? Not an outright redesign, but taking the mechanic and using it in some unusual way.

That said, more testers seems likely to be a useful thing anyway! ^_^

[RbdJellyfish]

Update 10 (9/26/17): One Area Left

I finished the gameplay draft of the touch area, finally. I'm a couple months late in my mind, mostly because my original touch mechanic idea didn't fit the theme of "touch" very well (as I mentioned off-hand in a previous post), and I had to think of a whole new mechanic and design a new set of puzzles for it. But I can still hit my end-year milestone, I think. Just gotta focus.

Here's a screenshot of the last puzzle in the touch area. It's pretty complicated



Anyway, with the last of the 5 main areas drafted, I'm off to work on the end-game area. Which should be pretty interesting...

[Thaumaturge]

Late or not, well done on getting that draft done, and good luck in hitting your end-of-year milestone! ^_^

If I may, what was your previous "touch" mechanic, and what is the new one? I'm very curious about how you represented this sense! (Looking at the level-layout, I see various obstacles and convolutions of the outer boundaries, so perhaps a blind maze of some sort?)

[RbdJellyfish]

Update 11 (10/22/17): Lots of Improvements

End-game Progess

I started the end game area and finished a couple puzzles in it so far. I have a lot planned out and have slowly been working on putting those ideas into the game; some of it involves not just level design, but extra programming to update existing mechanics as well. So there's lots to work on in the next couple months! Leaving out details because again, I don't want to spoil the ending gameplay, but it's going well so far.


Taste Area Improvements

I've been thinking a lot lately about the tedium of clicking through every ingredient in the taste area, and I finally feel like I came across a solution. One idea was to add some sort of visual indicator of how an ingredient changes your reticle when you click on it, i.e. using a sign with a picture on it next to the ingredient bowl. That way you can see everything you need to see almost instantly, instead of having to click through a bunch of things to find a solution that you may already have in your head. There were some reasons I didn't like this idea initially, though. It limited my options for what kinds of puzzles I could make (for example, I wanted some taste puzzles to be about mixing sound effects, which you can't put on a sign post), it went against the spirit of the sense of "taste" because you weren't really tasting anything in game, and like I mentioned in a previous post, it removed a memory component that made some of the puzzles interesting.

I thought more about this sign-post idea and realized it would work if I combined it with the way things currently are instead of replacing them. I can add sign posts as a convenience to some of the puzzles, but leave them out when I want the keep the memory component or use non-visual ingredients. I also realized when you cook in real life, you don't taste every ingredient you have; you use labels to identify things.



Another cool things is that I can use the signs themselves as a sort of puzzle mechanic. For example, I can use some environmental storytelling to introduce the idea that you don't have to rely on the signs and identify things. If people already aren't aware that you can click on ingredients, not just the final mixture, to taste them, they will be when they beat this room.



On top of that, I added a couple other puzzles to raise the overall difficulty of the area, since it felt too easy. I haven't tested this area yet with other people, but I personally feel a lot better about it. It's been an area I've had sketchy feelings about since I started working on it, so it's a bit of a relief that I actually like it now.


Outer Environment

I decided to fill the outer edges of the world with something to make it feel less empty/artificial. I was thinking of a sort of dead, wasteland vibe, and gray boxes that fit the current artstyle seem to work pretty well in that regard.



I had to tweak my edge detection shader a bit so it wasn't as strong at a distance. Closer to the horizon, there ended up being a lot of strong black lines, which were distracting, so I fade the effect out the further away things are.




Character Movement

I also spent this weekend working on character movement. For the sake of control/having fun programming, when I started out, I ended up completely avoiding UE4's character controllers/built in movement code and wrote my own. My first attempt (which I've been using for over a year and a half now) worked well enough, but had a lot of noticeable rough patches - walking on some slopes caused jitter, jumping wouldn't work in some cases, standing on elevators wasn't very smooth, etc. It all worked, but just wasn't high quality, not to mention the code was a frankenstein mess that hadn't been refactored in a long time.

Yesterday I ended up rewriting almost everything that involved jumping and moving on slopes, and the results are so much better. Some of the things that helped are:

 - The jitter on slopes was caused by 1) gravity from the physics engine fighting my own acceleration, and 2) completely horizontal velocity being conserved when you transition from flat ground to a slope. Disabling gravity and manually applying it only when the player wasn't standing on ground helped. I also added a way to detect slope changes and project current velocity/acceleration onto the new surface using its normal to allow for a smooth transition without change overall speed.

 - The jumping inconsistency was because I had a check that would disallow people basically jumping twice before leaving the ground fully and getting a super high jump, and the check failed whenever I tried to jump uphill for some reason. I ended up just using a ~0.5 second timer that activates right when you jump and disables jumps until it runs out, even if you're standing on the ground. It was way more elegant than what I had before, which was such a mess that I don't even think I can explain what it was.

 - For some reason, moving the elevator code from the player to the elevator makes it way smoother. I essentially have the elevator raycast up for the player and update the player position itself as it moves, instead of having the player raycast down and move itself when the elevator moves. It's probably some sort of physics execution order thing, and updating the player position directly after updating the elevator position gives me the most control over what I want.


Overall, lots of progress, but I'm still at a point where every time I knock something off on the to-do list, something else takes its place. I guess that's just part of game dev, though!

[Thaumaturge]

That last point notwithstanding, it seems that you're making progress, and that things are shaping up well. If I'm right, then I'm glad of it! ^_^

I'm happy to read that the "flavour" area now satisfies your... *ahem* taste. ;P

As to clicking on the taste objects, what about simply having an ingredient's "flavour" appear when the player simply looks at it, rather than requiring a click? (But perhaps requiring a click on the first "taste".) That might allow players to quickly remind themselves of a "flavour" without having to click, and without the addition of sign-posts.

The outer terrain looks nice, to my eye. I wonder whether it might not be worth reducing the intensity of the shadows in that region--perhaps more so with distance--so that it draws the eye a little less?