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[zede05]

Updated 3-29-17
Demo: http://www.indiedb.com/games/protoform/downloads/protoform

Hey everyone. We're finishing up on Planet Explorers, so I thought it’s good time to start a thread on our next game. We’ve actually split our Planet Explorers team into two, making this game and another one, but the other one is way early.

Anyway, this game is called Protoform. It’s a single player puzzle game with some stealth elements. Yes, yes, we know puzzle games are hard to do and even harder to make fun. So it is a challenge. In our design philosophy, players don’t have to be skilled in the controls. We want them to focus on thinking instead and find a single solution for each puzzle set piece. It’s not exactly an innovative idea, but there aren’t too many 3D puzzle/stealth games out there, so we hope the game will find a niche.

With puzzle games, we think they’re mostly tied together by a good story and interesting puzzles. For Protoform, we wrote a somewhat thought-provoking story (it’s also a little cliché). In the story, we have a young female protagonist who is exploring an unknown world. The goal is not to tell the story of a hero, but to wax philosophical about human nature, heh. So with that in mind, when we were designing the protagonist, we didn’t want to create an obvious personality. She’s not going to talk at all throughout the game; all of her animations will also be somewhat stale, no exaggerated movements. We hope players will see her as an everyday girl.



As for interesting puzzles, we feel that making non-linear puzzles are too hard for our team and take too much time, so all of our puzzles will be linear. Players won’t have multiple choices in solving the puzzles, there’s only one correct way, and it’s rather unforgiving. If they can’t find the correct way, maybe they will die multiple times. At least on paper, all of our current puzzle designs only have one way of getting from point A to point B. But we have found some loopholes in our first demo. Some players found other unexpected methods to solve the puzzle. We are still not sure if that’s what we want.

This game has been developing for a while, we’ll update this thread early and often. As always, all opinions and suggestions are welcome (not that I need to point this out, haha).

Here are some early screens:

[Moriny]

We had a very flat look for the game lighting wise and we’ve been trying to find a way to change it. In the last week we’ve added a light probe solution to the game, in order to improve the lighting system.

As shown in the pics, objects can now receive indirect lights from other light sources, allowing for us to have some environment lighting.


The dots you see below in the top down view are the light probes that records lighting status in each spot. Each light probe pre-records lighting settings for their position, when the player reaches that position, the lighting settings will be made realtime. This allows the lighting to change in realtime as the player moves amongst the light probes.

[JohnyBGooD]

Stealth-puzzle. I love this genre!

[Moriny]

Stealth-puzzle. I love this genre!

Thanks bro! We really want to make something different after Planet Explorers.

[Moriny]

Happy Lunar New Year everyone! It’s the year of rooster and we wish you all the best.

We always wanted to have a free-flowing fabric for the female protagonist, we decided early on to use cloth for the clothing instead of just bones and animation. Initially, we wanted to implement the effect of flowing fabrics with a certain plug-in for Unity. But due to the instability, we turned to Unity’s build-in functions.



This is just a glance of how it looks in game, but nothing is permanent. We are still monitoring the performance of the fabric. So everything may change in time. We feel it’s pretty close to the desired effect.

[Moriny]

This is another concept art recently finished by our art designer. It’s interesting because it reminds me of Monument Valley, so I want to share it with all of you.



Even though, I assure you we didn’t take inspirations from Monument Valley and our game will not look like it. The unexpected similarity just happened.

Please feel free to tell us if you like it and your thoughts on this.

[Moriny]

Recently we’ve been working on a new feature, it’s something we never showed before.



Here is a gif that shows you how it looks when operating. We want it to be as stylish as other objectives and designs in game. we can’t share much information because it involves spoilers about gameplay.

You can take a wild guess what its function is. I can hint that it sometimes provide invulnerability to players.

[Moriny]

Today I was watching our team members working on scenes, then I found an interesting comparison between views from different angles.



It’s a corridor that connects two certain levels. Through the glass, you can see other buildings in the scene. To give players the sense of endlessness, we made the other end of the building look darker.

Now let’s take a look from the outside.



You can see we only finished a few necessary structures. Just want to show you how different the view is from outside.

[Moriny]

Few weeks ago, we held a testing for the first demo of Protoform internally. It turned out we heard people complaining the controlling was too difficult. Then we decided to improve it.



Originally, to reach a high platform with a cube, players needed to place the cube on the platform first, then climb up it, and pick up the cube in the end. After the testing, most people felt exhausted with it and its simplification seemed inevitable. Then we decided to combine the three-step action into one action.



Now the current version is complete and smooth. We are going to keep monitoring its performance. Further changes will be made to it if necessary, although it’s unlikely to happen.

[Bin]

Hi guys. I'm a designer on Protoform，It has been several months since we last updated our progress here. During this time, we have been dedicated to Protoform’s development and we are excited tell you all that we will release new Protoform demo in mid Dec .

Compared with last demo，we improve the details and add dubbing,I'm goning to show you the sample of voice actor:https://clyp.it/user/nxqkkfyu

[Devi Ever]

Happy Lunar New Year everyone! It’s the year of rooster and we wish you all the best.

We always wanted to have a free-flowing fabric for the female protagonist, we decided early on to use cloth for the clothing instead of just bones and animation. Initially, we wanted to implement the effect of flowing fabrics with a certain plug-in for Unity. But due to the instability, we turned to Unity’s build-in functions.



This is just a glance of how it looks in game, but nothing is permanent. We are still monitoring the performance of the fabric. So everything may change in time. We feel it’s pretty close to the desired effect.

The fabric really brings a lot of polish to the movement, and all the recent updates looks like ya'll have a really high quality project in the works!  Surprised more people haven't commented.

[The Last Lamb]

Hi I'm a developer of this game. I'm not sure there are any one look this...

We are trying to sync lips by audio now, but only got this:


(a curve of one vowel)

How to smooth this? Still no idea...

[The Last Lamb]

"See, I can totally pass this by myself!"

[Bin]

Hi guys, an update of work progress is that we have to delay the demo release from mid Dec to late Dec due to  unsatisfactory sound effects and music. Especially the sound effects, we've been stuck with it for a while.

Therefore, we are also here seeking for some help and advices on the sound effects of #Protoform.

In Protoform, some objects produce similar sound effects, when activated, including dangerous laser wall, electric sentinels, carpets. At the begining, we designed a low-frequency humming sound. As the development progresses, more objects being added to the game, the resulting sound get a bit chaotic, and not friendly to players' ears certainly...

We are thinking to design different sounds for different objects, or to set different sound decay radius for different objects, to reduce players' uncomfort for hearing so many low-frequency sound.

What do you guys think? Any enlightenment will be much needed and appreciated!