Here are some of my playthrough notes. I played for maybe a half hour (I'm not sure because I kept pausing to write this).
I get pretty nitpicky here, but also I don't get so nitpicky if I don't see a possibility for greatness
No problem! This is exactly the type of feedback we need
30 minutes sounds about right; other playtesters spent about the same.
-- The general idea of Closure in 3D is pretty good. (It also reminds me of some of the Mario Galaxy mechanics, like in the Matter Splatter Galaxy.)
-- It's pretty intuitive, I think.
Cool. I've actually heard that comparison to Galaxy before. Maybe we should take some inspiration from it.
-- The virtual "footprint" of the player (for the standing-on-something calculation) seems way too narrow, leading to some nonsensical situations (like I'm clearly human-sized when compared to lamps and doorways, yet I can fall through a 2-3cm crack in the ground). It also makes the "jumping puzzles" frustrating. (Metroid Prime is a good example of a wide "footprint" making first-person jumping tolerable.)
Spot on! We are very aware of this issue and haven't quite figured out a good way to solve it yet. Part of the problem is how we detect the feet. Right now, each foot has four points (think a rectangular shoe). When all of these eight points are in shadow, you fall down. However, we still need to tweak the size and distances of the feet.
The other part of the frustration is the visual feedback (or lack thereof). We have some ideas about visualizing the player falling into the shadow as a volumetric mass. Think something like quicksand, goo or water. We don't know yet how to do this, but some shader work could maybe make it more clear. At the moment, we have a placeholder vignette camera effect that shows when you are inside an object (e.g., being sucked into a shadow), but this doesn't work fully yet.
In general, we are having a hard time dealing with how to visualize that the player is inside an object, since it just looks odd to be inside a 3D model. We are thinking about having camera effects that somehow illustrate this "dissolve" effect. Beyond: Two Souls had a nice effect when the camera was clipping inside an object (looked like smoke or paper burning).
About Metroid Prime: Yes, that game has superb first-person (jumping) controls. You have a great sense of body awareness (proprioception). One trick they use is to tilt the camera down when you jump.
For our game, we are actually not THAT interested in first-person platforming, but we thought it would be nice to have some to vary the experience. The ventilator jumping area definitely needs tweaking and balancing. Same goes with player movement, speed and jumping height.
-- It's a bit jarring that the lamps obey a different physics than the player, like they can stand on things that aren't illuminated. Like when I fall off a cliff, the lamp doesn't; it looks odd to respawn and see the lamp standing there where I couldn't.
We don't really tell it in the prototype, but the idea is that only the player has the "shadow ability". Everything else works as normal. That being said, we are thinking about having special properties for specific objects (think Braid where some objects obey the rules of time-travelling, while others don't).
(It's a bit inconsistent, actually; in the back-up-to-make-a-bridge-level it sometimes fell with me, sometimes stayed, and once stayed until I approached it, then fell slowly as if into ooze.) You can sometimes use this to solve a puzzle in a way that I'm not sure was intended, like one where I ran a gap with a lamp, dying but leaving the lamp suspended in midair, then respawned on the other side but still in reach of the lamp.
That's definitely not intended. Sounds like some bugs we need to figure out. Would you have time to reproduce this and maybe record a GIF of video?
Did you notice the green outline for the lamps? The idea is that if an object gets stuck out in the darkness, you can recall it by clicking on this outline. The visual aspect for this is far from finished, but it gets the job done. We would like an effect similar to Reaper's teleport in Overwatch.
-- It seems like the footprint calculation differs depending on whether the player is holding a lamp. Carrying a lamp, standing near the edge of something, and putting down the lamp can sometimes cause me to plummet to my death, which doesn't make sense. (If I'm carrying it, then what matters are where my feet are. Even if I'm dragging it, my feet have to be in contact with the ground or dragging doesn't happen.)
I think what happens is that you place the lamp down and immediately fall into its shadow. We know that this is very annoying. We are thinking about making the lamp not cast a shadow, but unsure how to communicate this in an intuitive way.
-- I'm not particularly enamoured of the puzzles yet; I didn't really feel a lot of "aha" moments where I realized something about the mechanics that I didn't notice at the outset. This will probably improve in the future if you plan on increasing the number of mechanics.
That's fair enough. We do indeed hope to introduce more mechanics to challenge the player to really think outside the box.
-- It was more "I realize what I'm supposed to do, but I guess I need to move the lamp about 0.5 meters over and 3 degrees further left." That sort of adjustment wasn't fun for me. Cutting down the possibilities (maybe that lamps can only be pushed and rotated in quantized increments?) might have cut down on having to do little adjustments, and made it clearer when I had or hadn't found the right solution.
We've heard similar feedback before where players describe it as "hacking" or "exploiting" the game. We believe this is due to the analog nature of the game, as you describe. It's currently too much about specific solutions where you need to place a lamp at EXACTLY one spot. We want it to be more about mentally solving the puzzles, not so much about the "dexterity" of it. I think introducing limitations as you describe might be a good approach. When you think about it, a game like Portal also limits where the player can place portals (white, flat surfaces).
-- I'd start out closer to the first puzzle, or condense that area into something smaller. Hit me quickly with what makes your game special.
Point taken. The prototype doesn't necessarily reflect how the beginning of the full game will be, but what we have right now was designed from the mindset that we need to teach the basics step by step. We also aim to put more emphasis on the graphical aspect, as well as the narrative and atmosphere, to make it more interesting and engaging. We would love to create a vibe akin to LIMBO or INSIDE.
But yes, we could definitely start out with the puzzles earlier. Maybe the jumping section with the ventilations should be (re)moved.
-- The endpoint of the level wasn't always clear to me (like the puzzle where it's not the door but the circle of light beyond the door, or the second-to-last puzzle where I didn't see the exit until I was almost there). This is a difficulty of 3d, since the nature of 3d is that things are occluded from the camera. It'd be good to lay things out so that your vantage point upon entry into an area shows you both the goal and the fundamental problem keeping you from it. (Similar to Warren Spector's "no backwards puzzles" maxim, where the player shouldn't be able to see the mechanical solution to a problem before they see the goal they're working towards.)
I agree. We actively tried to do this, but I see there is still room for improvement. We are inspired by the philosophy described in this Gamasutra article:
A 'key' tip about keys and doors from BioShock's lead level designer. Also, in the final game we wish to make the world feel more connected and seamless and less like loading new "levels".
-- The latency of the jump feels a bit too long; I always jump a split-second later than I'd expect.
Got ya. We might also need to introduce a
ghost jump.
-- It wasn't immediately obvious that you can't jump when you're holding a lamp. (The visual clue for jumping -- that everything moves -- isn't quite as strong as in other games, because it may happen that where the player is looking is mostly dark.) Rather than disabling the jump key, it might help to juice a failed jump a bit (like with a bit of a movement plus a grunt sound plus a clank as the lamp hits the ground again).
We definitely need some feedback for this. The reason why we disable jumping when holding an object is to limit/avoid situations where you can exploit puzzles by taking a lamp to a place that we don't intend.
-- Having a light flicker a bit as it turns on and off gives a bit of warning as to what's happening. (Also, it's nice to give the player a bit of a "temporal footprint" where they can briefly be unsupported if there was ground there a split second before or after.)
Sounds like a good idea (kinda like in the old Road Runner cartoons
).
Anyway, good work and I'm looking forward to see where this goes!
Thank you! And thanks for the elaborate feedback. Much appreciated! If you have any interest in playing future builds of the game, you can subscribe to our newsletter at our homepage:
http://tunnelvisiongames.com (big blue button)
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