I’m shiftBacktick, the developer of Periphery Synthetic EP. Here you may ask me anything about the project or myself. Cheers!
I have a question that has burning at the back of my metaphorical soul ever since I found your games. I hope you don’t mind me asking :-). But considering you said ask you anything, and this shouldn’t be a rude or offensive question… Here goes:
Is your name, “shift back tick”, significantly different than the simple character ~ or the name “tilde”, beside just being a longer form? I.E. if I were to talk about tilde’s games, would it make any since at all.
-Michael.
:-)} All in fun.
Excellent question! 😹
The handle is a reference to the tilde. On a US English keyboard, that’s what I press to type that character.
My first major encounter with the tilde was in college while learning Max/MSP in a few music classes. I liked how its meaning changed in the software to represent a sine wave, or the foundation of everything we hear.
For a few years I’ve had a tiny tilde tattooed on my wrist, when making this sort of electronic music was still just a daydream. It’s funny how that’s materialized into this hobby!
That’s all to say, that you could refer to these things by tilde, when the context is right.
Hi! Thank you for sharing your frustrations with me.
This is a difficult choice for me, because I understand how a clearly defined path would be helpful. This game is intended to be explored nonlinearly, at your own pace, in a way that the story unfolds organically as you perform certain actions or encounter randomly-generated things.
I don’t want to add features that would take away any sense of discovery, by telling folks what to do (or not do) as they play. However, I am always considering improvements to the core game systems and upgrades, to help empower folks in their discovery.
I’m assuming that you might be stuck at collecting all the artifacts. Their locations are random. Currently, the best way to find them is to pick a direction and drive.
In a future update, this could be improved with an upgrade for the scanning system. For example, it might call out the direction of the nearest artifact or cache when used. This is possible but not currently on the roadmap.
That’s correct! Each site has an associated fast travel location and artifact to collect. After a while you’ll find all the artifacts, and additional sites you discover will give you a Simplex instead. This is generally how all the worlds will work. In the upcoming new world there are mountains to climb, in the following there will be caves to explore, and so on. Doing so will progress the story and offer rewards.
By the way, I reflected on your question, and made some changes in today’s update based on your feedback. The structures now have a unique sound in scan results. And collecting the artifacts will automatically discover them. There is still more work to do, but I hope these changes help.
Cheers!
Hey! I wanted to let you know that I’ve changed my mind on this. The release next week will make the scanner point in the direction of the nearest destination, discovered or not. I needed a development tool to help me capture interesting videos and screenshots, and then realized that it really improved the experience. I’m sorry for not understanding that sooner. I hope it’s a step in the right direction. Cheers!