Time to Refine

So my lungs have been attempting to evacuate my body through my face over the past couple of days but I did manage to make some progress. I've made a second ambient soundtrack as well as an animated title for our game to be used wherever is appropriate.

https://soundcloud.com/scotty-brebner/ambience-2
There is also a loop track for this that carries any echoes from the loop. I animated the power core but I found myself struggling to push it any further than anything basic considering my brain currently feels like its been filled with glue.
My current goals are to fix the floor of the hole puzzle due to misbehaving normals. I need to process the sound effects I found into usable sound bites and improve the core if I think it necessary. I also have two more puzzle ideas but I'll only put the effort into making them once we have a solid demo. I believe we are at the point where we should be refining what we have rather than cranking out more content. Quality over quantity and all that.

Cube Storm

Just a quick update on some more assets I've made. I also created an individual opening sound for the 2,4 and 8-bit doors. Cool beans.

Puzzle Bulking

I love how simple our aesthetic is. It's so easy to crank out a puzzle once it's been conceptualised. These two I started today and I'm pretty happy with both.

The first has a very simple concept; extrude the blocks horizontally to form something to climb on. It only differs from the early ones by having extrusion be horizontal instead of vertical. Climbing around the pillar in the centre of the puzzle should be entertaining as it isn't a linear path. The solution is obvious from the start so this puzzle is more for bulking out the beta. These are the types of puzzles I think would go well to bracket the more difficult ones, almost as a means of reassuring the player that the game isn't cheating... much.

This is a perspective-extrusion combo puzzle to be put anywhere in the world. It relies on the player having a limited distance over which their click will respond in something extruding. This will require them to build a staircase to reach the block that extrudes into a bridge. From there they can reach the middle platform and extrude another block. Unfortunately this block maxes out just too far from the ledge the player needs to get to, and they need to use perspective to make it reach that last bit. There is also another hidden comment left by "Kathleen the programmer" for her comrade "Jerry".

Intentional Glitches

I think I called my sister a glitch in life once, as siblings do... She's tough. Anyway, here's a re-cap on what I've been up to for EOF recently: firstly I finished another level for extrusion staircase puzzles (with one or two more on the way). It was supposed to be quite simple but then I realised that there will be a decent amount of trail and error with getting the stairs to line up and there will most likely be an element of backtracking necessary to get it perfect. The ramp downstairs is also slightly concealed to encourage a bit of exploration.

 I also slipped this in beneath one of the drops. I had this idea of adding a bit of comedy to the game by having comments from the "programmers" of the world who are in the middle of a passive aggressive conversation about the state of the system. These comments are all one-sided shapes, therefore can only be viewed from the right angle. For this reason they would be placed in areas that the player could only stumble onto them by accident.

I also collected a bunch of base sound effects that we can use in the game. Most of them are variants on glitch noises so we'll have a range to choose from. The credit for these sound effects belong to those who uploaded them to freesound.org;
http://www.freesound.org/people/syn2x-v0/sounds/2314/
http://www.freesound.org/people/Robert%20Bar/sounds/101226/
http://www.freesound.org/people/gumballrimpoche/sounds/65428/
http://www.freesound.org/people/AlienXXX/sounds/195533/
http://www.freesound.org/people/klangfabrik/sounds/178128/
http://www.freesound.org/people/Jace/sounds/35291/
http://www.freesound.org/people/VlatkoBlazek/sounds/185761/
After talking over the current soundtrack with Adrian he said that the music we had was too upbeat. I produced this to create a more ambient, lonely feel: https://soundcloud.com/scotty-brebner/eof-ambience
Another thing I've started to consider is the aesthetic that will be used for a glitch when the world changes. How we're going to project the image to the character is currently undecided as we need to look into what our options are such as camera filters or invisible planes with the texture on them etc. Regardless, I gathered some images to look over the type of textures I want to create.

Rather than full screen disruption I prefer the sort of glitches presented in the second image. Completely messing with the screen makes it clear that we're hiding a change behind it but I believe the right level of subtlety will conceal the tackiness of a jump by presenting it in a an intentionally jumpy way... if that makes sense...

Channelling Bowie

I feel like I'm planning the labyrinth with all these staircase puzzles. It's been good to get back to modelling the little mind-benders now that my other classes have had their hand-ins.

There's still plenty to do before these become usable however. There's a rendering issue with single sided shapes and since the rooms are cutaways from squares that means I have some tweaking to do.
I also cranked out a new set of doors that wouldn't be lost on the Enterprise. I make a little "pssshhhh" noise in my head every time I see them open.

Once I do the perspective trick door in this style then we'll have enough door assets... maybe... hopefully... I don't want to animate a 32-piece door.

My Current State of Work is a AAA Battery

Alpha, Asana and Assets. So today was the alpha presentations for everyone's games. We got to see Odyssey and The Mountain's alphas which gave us some scope on where we should be at.
The main points of feedback were that we needed more puzzles and we need to adjust our aesthetic. As far as puzzles are concerned its just a matter of cranking them out. We're going to split off into designer/coder pairs and produce a puzzle each which we'll stitch to the main world once they are completed. The edge renderer for the aesthetic is quite volatile at the moment and is spamming random black lines on otherwise blank surfaces which looks a bit nasty. Something we were considering was this glitch aesthetic for concealing the perspective transitions that could be applied to the general appearance of objects. Shapes could have a cyan/magenta/yellow edge to them that are ever so slightly displaced, kind of like the red and blue used in a 3D movie.
Other gameplay elements that we need to work on are getting the jump more natural and making the collision sphere for the player against walls and such a bit smaller. We need to fix the checkpoint teleportation for when the player falls of the edge of something as well because at the moment they just fall infinitely.
I've been working alongside Chris to produce some music and here is my first attempt at a game soundtrack ever:
https://soundcloud.com/scotty-brebner/sets/puzzling-echoes
I used FL Studio and some plug-ins to produce it. At the moment its a bit energetic and the kind of music we need is more ambient and incomplete. Only once the player starts fixing the world does the music become more whole.
Lastly I have a new set of assets to work on. The original perspective door I made was cool as far as the illusion was concerned but it looked boring. After a talk with Adrian we decided on making our corridors widened octagons and our doors resemble Star Trek airlocks.

Pretty much once Iv'e got my level with James sorted I'm going to work on producing a 4-piece and 8-piece door as well as recreating the perspective illusion with this new shape.