itch.io Community » Game Development » Devlogs

Townframe - A puzzle game where you recreate towns from people's memories

Norrimo · 2022-04-19T11:10:19Z

Hi, I'm Patrick, a solo game developer from Germany and now I'm working on my first commercial game Townframe . It's a small town maker puzzle game where you recreate town's from peoples memories. How the game works: In the g ame you got a lot of different windows of different towns and from each town is a person from (the picture below is an example). These people gives you the request to recreate a town how they are describe it. These requests are formed as riddles you have to solve. You have different tools you can use to solve these puzzle. At the start of the game you just have a town generator tool and your mouse which you use to change the buidlings. If you solve a riddle you get a coin which you can use to get new tools which allow you to discover even more hidden things in these towns. Other tools in the game will be for example a wind tool which allows you to change the direction of the clouds and speed of other things. (I don't want to go too deep into the tools because they are part of the puzzles) But all your tools are working in every townframe. So you can even explore hidden things in towns where the riddles are already solved. I just want to make a puzzle game where the puzzle places are not thrown away after you solve them. So these places gives you some more deep insign after you got more tools. It's kinda like a metroidvania. (early concept art) The current state of the game: At the moment the basic gameplay of the game is working. That means: you can generate a town at once you can click on each building and create a new one randomly (maybe you will have later an option to create the buildings in order) you can solve a basic puzzle, get a coin and buy a new tool you can make screenshots (yup, that's probably one of the tools) you can close the game & change some settings like fullscreen on/off What the final game will have: I want to "finish" the game in the next 2 -3 months. So I want to keep it small but very polished. Polishing time could also be a few extra weeks. At the end you will probably have at least 10 - 15 different frame puzzles you can solve. Some of them will be harder than others and some of them will be easy. I want to design the game in a way that you can complete the "main" game and still have the option to make one of the harder puzzles too. The language of the game will be in english. Maybe german too, because that's my mother tongue. Other languages would be nice but at the moment I don't have the resources for more translations. Could also be something that can happen in the future. Where will the game be available: The game will be comming to itch.io and steam. At the moment I don't intend to release it on consoles. But who knows what comes in the future. I also have a steam page. If you want to support the project you can wishlist it there: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1927150/Townframe/?utm_source=itchdevlog Every wishlist helps. And that's it for now. I will continue this devlog in the next few weeks. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to put them down here. :)

A topic by Norrimo created Apr 19, 2022 Views: 1,620 Replies: 40

Viewing posts 21 to 23 of 23 · Previous page · First page

Norrimo1 year ago

Exhibition of Townframe (Caggtus 2023)

Hi everyone, this month I exhibited Townframe on the Caggtus in Leipzig (Germany). It was also the first time that it was played in public,
so that was very cool and I learned alot how people want to play the game and what I need to improve.
I made a little video about the whole experience. Have fun and enjoy my poor english. :)

Like Reply

tersoo341 year ago(+2)

i like your content

Like Reply

Norrimo1 year ago

Thanks! Makes me happy to hear that. :)

Like Reply

Noapna303 days ago

Hi there, I just discovered your game through Wholesome Games's website and I need to say that it looks really cool!

I work in a video game localization company called Active Gaming Media and by looking at your progress, I believe that you are 'almost' at the end of it so I was wondering if you were interested in localizing your video game into other languages.

Maybe it is not something you plan to do right now since you mentioned that you could not afford a compositor at the moment so maybe after your game gets released?

Let me know if you are interested :)

In any case, keep up the clean work!

Like Reply

Norrimo303 days ago

Hi Noapna, thank you!!
Yes, in the devlog it may look like it's very far along in production, but there are still many things to do and to design.

Honestly, I would love to translate the game into other languages, but as you noted, I can't afford it right now.
But maybe next year.

There is also another reason why I don't want to translate the game too early. The whole game consists of the written puzzles that your customers give you. So each sentence is very difficult to write. The words must leave room for interpretation, but not confuse or imply too much. Even writing the puzzles in my own language (German) is difficult and in every playtest I notice little things where other words would be better.
So I will probably add more languages when I know for sure which are the correct words needed in the riddles.

I can inform you and your company when I have more information about possible additional language support. :)

Like Reply

Noapna302 days ago

Hi there Norrimo, thank you for your message :)

I completely understand the budget issue, maybe next year then!

Of course, that is the tricky part when it comes to puzzle type games where key words play an important role (otherwise the player just won't be able to progress...) But for what is worth, we already handled similar games in, for example, korean and from what I remember, the crucial part was during the LQA where there was a need to carefully check each key word so the player's experience would be as natural as possible.

But anyways, look forward to hear again from you in the future :)

I'll just leave my mail there just in case if you want ever want to reach me out again!

naoto.shimada@activegamingmedia.com

Best,

Like Reply

Norrimo301 days ago(+1)

Hi Noapna, that's a very cool insight into how your localization works! Yeah, those keywords are tricky.
And I will save me up your contact mail. Thanks for that too. :)

Like Reply

Viewing posts 21 to 23 of 23 · Previous page · First page