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A Game of Changes - Greenlight Voting Open :D

A topic by Bit Outside the Box created Feb 16, 2016 Views: 2,471 Replies: 22

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Bit Outside the Box8 years ago (4 edits)

Chance and destiny find themselves interlaced in A Game of Changes.

Journey through the 64 unique puzzle levels that draw inspiration and teachings from one of the oldest classic books in human history, the I Ching (Book of Changes) whose unique wisdom originates from philosophical and scientific observations of the laws which rule existence.

It invites us to conscientiously look within, at one's own personality, character, perspective and purpose while inspiring us to discover the one unspoken, unmanifest, unchanging truth.

Release Date: Q2 2016
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux (possibility of an Android release at a later stage)

Official game page: http://www.bitoutsidethebox.com/a-game-of-changes/

Hi everyone!
I'll be posting while I develop this game, although many parts will have to be kept away from public so as not to spoil the puzzles and some secrets of the game :)

I'm developing the game using the Godot engine in Linux, with a bunch of other free software tools like Blender, Inkscape, Audacity, and the like.

Stay tuned for more devlog action :)

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

A lot of the core mechanics are done, just a few remain to do.. but I still have to decide about them before coding.
Here's a short gif about... decisions :) (last part had to be cut due to GIF limitations)

Godot is really nice to work with, the way the scene tree works allows for some really quick level building and easy changes to the whole game.

slimefriend8 years ago

this looks cool, but its kinda hard to get a good grasp of what the mechanics are from the gif. how does the game work? what is your goal?

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

yeah, that was a short recording of me testing some mechanics, its not an actual level, so there is no goal there ;)

I'll post more (nearly-finished) stuff soon

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago (1 edit)

Kind of frustrating to spend an entire doing working on the game and having so little to show... but most of the changes were very code-oriented. At least the foundations for the interaction with the tiles and level switching are 90% done

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

building the first 2 levels and setting up some nice environments :)

UltimateWalrus8 years ago

This looks cool! I definitely like a laid-back puzzle game every now and then, so it'll be interesting to see what it's like when it's done. I'm also a fan of tank controls :)

Obviously the game's a work in progress so this may already be on your list, but a more finely tuned camera would definitely give it a more polished feel. Even just adding some "laziness" to it and not having it react to the jumping would help. But since it looks like you are using tank movement, you have the advantage of easily being able to put in movie-style camera cuts to more cinematic views.

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

Hi! yes I've updated the camera to a better one :)

Sorry I'm a bit lazy in updating the devlog, but I've made a summarized update of many changes on IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/a-game-of-changes/new...

I haven't yet made a gif with the new camera, but there's cool stuff in there :)

UltimateWalrus8 years ago

Cool! Looking better already. I don't think there's anything wrong with bouncing back and forth between core gameplay coding and polish. As long as you are OK with your game idea, you know it's fun, and are committed to completing the game at this point, all that stuff has to be done anyway, so it's whatever order feels most natural. For my Ludum Dare game Vertico the very first thing I did was make all the music and ambiance before any coding, to set the mood.

If I were doing the camera, I'd try setting up specific cameras for each level and place them what I feel is the most cinematic view that also lets the player see what they need to. I would tie this camera to specific hexes so when they move to a different area, the camera switches. If you'd like, you can still allow the player to manually break from this control, or have not-as-important areas where camera control happens algorithmically. This was used to great effect in Twinsen's Odyssey:

Since you have tank movement this sudden cut wouldn't disrupt player controls at all, but if you prefer you could just have your camera lerp from one position to the next. This technique is definitely underutilized in third-person games --- either it just doesn't occur to people or they don't want to do the work.

Also the hard-shaded water is a neat effect, but you could probably improve its motion by applying a perlin noise function to the y positions of its vertices.

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

No code done yesterday. just worked on UI and art.
re-did the 3d model of the gate(door that leads to next selected level)

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

in-game overlay of the level's map when holding tab

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

These past days I've been introducing a few more mechanics to make the puzzles more interesting and challenging.
Below is the "flip" tile, which makes the elements swap with their opposites. Still thinking about this though, instead of flopping having them rotate between themselves would also be interesting...

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

Another week passed so here's another A Game of Changes summarized devlog!

Life got in the way a lot during this week so I couldn't move forward so much as I wanted to, but still many new things got done.

New mechanics got introduced, which will make puzzles more interesting and challenging. The first one is the "flip" tile, which will swap elements to their opposites:

A new kind of tile is also available which features a "tunnel" below the surface (sorry for the crappy gif quality)

And lastly a rock(fixed) tile, which will never move from its position

Rock tiles are also not affected by the "flip", so this will allow some interesting puzzle mechanics.

Nothing of this is final for now, I'm still testing and working out what works best and provides a good playing experience.

On a more funny and less important side, snow footsteps :D

And finally, I started working on the first draft for a tile texture.

Not sure if I will use textures or not. The whole art of the game is still not clearly defined, and ideally I will be able to get the help of an artist to work on it. Which brings me to my last point....

Funding. I'm finalizing a few major things and solving major bugs to then produce a private demo to send to a few places. With a relatively small funding I could really boost this game's quality by bringing other people's expertise and also have a little more slack in development time to polish it. I'm going to explore a few options and let's see what happens. Suggestions welcomed :)

I've also set up a short google form for people to subscribe to the game's launch notifications. So, if you are interested in it, leave your email and I'll get in touch with you. I'll probably also email a few people to ask for beta testers (and give them a final copy for free ;))

See you next week or, for daily news, get your info via twitter or the devlog at tigsource.

UltimateWalrus8 years ago

Looking good! I love the secret tunnel.

My suggestions on funding/spending money on freelancers, coming from someone who does a lot of freelance:

If you like making games, you are almost always better investing in yourself... learning how to make that cool shader you want in your game may take a lot of time and effort, but afterwards your experience has grown, so next time it'll be much easier. Spending money on a freelancer might make logistical sense in the short term but if you plan on making game development part of your life, improving your own skills will be much more rewarding long-term.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. The only way for something to match your vision exactly is for you to make it yourself. Collaboration entails compromise, though with the right people it can lead to something new and better. In any case, creativity shines best when it's done in a playful, natural manner, done because you want to. Worrying about demographics, funding, etc. makes it not fun, which taints the end product and makes it turn out worse, so I don't do it :)

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

thanks for the tips :)

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

One week passed so here's another compact summarized devlog for A Game of Changes :)

Objects that stand in the way between the camera and the player are now made slightly transparent, so you can always see where you are going :)

A new tile effect has been added to aid in the mechanics and create interesting puzzles. You can only step on this tiles once, after they they disappear (need to work on the "disappear" effect, I know). This effect can be applied to any tile, even if it has other functions too.

Yesterday I had to really push my brains to work out a nice flow for the game levels. Its not easy adapt the I Ching to a game because the player could get stuck very easily. I had to use a huge paper to draw the level's connections and understand where problem might occur

levelmap

With that solved, I added to the game another important aspect of the I Ching: changing lines. With that, I introduced the first pickable object, after which you can toggle to change lines in the final hexagram. Demo video:

Next week I hope to show you some better animations as I expect to have the character walking animation ready :)

Don't forget there's a google form to subscribe to the game's launch notifications. See you next week or, for daily news, get your info via twitter or the devlog at tigsource.

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

Finally implemented the walking animation into the game. makes a ton of difference :) suddenly it feels more alive!

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

did a few more basic animations and connected it to the game. feels so much more alive now :D

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago

Hi folks! Sorry for not updating this for some time! Lots of changes have been made, the game is improving a lot!

Today I launched the trailer and the steam greenlight page, so please vote if you enjoy what you see :D

many thanks

Steam Greenlight Page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/...

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago (3 edits)

added controller support :)

Help me on Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=650471150

Bit Outside the Box8 years ago (1 edit)

Hi everyone!

Plenty of improvements done this week. I sent a playable demo to a few beta testers and got very valuable feedback. Completely revamped the controls of the player and the camera. Everything is much smoother and easier now :)

The main menu also got some improvements and feels better now :)

In the meantime, I've been taking a few more screenshots here and there that show some new levels.

betterwell

Also trying to improve the water look

On the Steam side of things, the greenlight campaign is really slow. Been trying my best to get the word out, but these kind of niche-oriented games are really hard to be noticed by big sites. And even the medium ones dont make much difference in bringing people to the page and vote.
Anyway, still have hope that it can be approved before the launch date as I would love to integrate achievements and other Steamworks features in it. Lets see :)

take care

slimefriend8 years ago

i think the issue that you have right now (other than the fact that greenlight is a bit of a shitshow and its really hard to get an unknown game greenlit) is that the game looks nice, but watching the trailer / reading the description doesnt give me a solid idea of how the game plays. i havent read the book of changes or used the i ching, so i cant understand the symbols or what they do.

slimefriend8 years ago

having said that, i just looked ur game up on greendb (http://greendb.net/greenlight/) and ur at 164, which means u can basically be greenlit at any moment now. star surveyor got greenlit at 140-somethin? so i wouldnt worry about the stats at this point.

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