Last week I vaguely mentioned that we’ve been doing some puzzle prototyping! In fact, we’ve done quite a lot of it, and here’s the first sneak peek of our in-house testing of two of the puzzles in the upcoming puzzle cave you’ll have to make your way through!

The first one is the phase shift challenge, where you’ll phase through time to reach your goal. For this puzzle, you have to move mirror blocks around both in the past and the present! When we make the correct graphics for this, we’ll have to make some kind of indicator for where the time rift is on the puzzle (currently simple blue u-shapes in this sketch version):

This is actually already the second iteration of this phase puzzle. The first one turned out to be more complicated than we first thought, even though the solution itself really wasn’t. The problem was that going back and forth in time really confused our brains (and, I admit, mine was the worst – I just panicked trying to figure out what to do, without finding a solution at all – ha)! So, we had to make the puzzle a bit easier. I guess we’ll save the mind-warping ones for an optional puzzle somewhere :)

Next up – the statue puzzle. Here you have to push some statues around, trying to figure our which one to move where. The only way of doing this is to cross check between the past and the present: where do I need to move statue x in order for it to hit button y as it falls? There’s also a hole that needs filling, and a cage of some sort holding a statue that needs to be released (currently illustrated by a barrel, hehe):

I’m currently very positive about these puzzles – they make you think a little, but they’re not too hard to solve once you know what to do! Definitely looking forward to completing this puzzle cave and give it some proper artwork :)

Speaking of prototyping, Teddy has been hard at work creating the water transitions in Tai Ming’s second map! To celebrate his success, he made a guest post about it on my blog, but I’ll post it here as well:

In game development, sometimes you encounter things that are so annoying to implement that you need to vent on someone else’s blog. This is one of those times.

Task: make a short transition between low water and high water, to be played when you close or open the dam in Tai Ming. Easy enough, right? Well, yes, but sometimes it’s the easy things that end up melting your mind!

Here are the assets involved (excluding the background) in creating the transition above:

The stuff in the pink square (top left) are overlays needed to preserve the illusion of depth. These had to be placed at heights intertwined with the stuff in the light blue square (bottom left), to make sure the right mass of water is behind and in front the right rock piece. Oh, and the rock pieces had to be cut out of the background with pixel perfect precision! The piece of grass was needed to hide the edge of the water on the left side.

In the dark blue section (top middle) are all the waterfall animations that Fred had to make! Each of them was a small puzzle of their own. The top four sprite sheets were pieces that can be used to create waterfalls of any height, needed for when the waterfall rises. This custom made waterfall must appear and disappear the correct way to fit with the “appear” and “disappear” animations. Note on the bottom spritesheet how the foam does not despawn until frame 5, meaning it must keep playing until then!

In the green square (middle bottom) you find Fred’s favorite pastime: animated water edges. These appear when the water has reached the top, hiding seams and creating some nice motion. Due to the uneven edges of the rock walls, however, these things don’t look proper at all while the water is moving! Something else was needed to hide the water’s edge during this period.

To this end, Fred made ten tiny particles, to be placed along the water’s edges! These are found in the red square (upper right). I had to be careful that these particles didn’t behave nonsensically, for example making sure that the water drops always flew away from the walls, to avoid water ripples on the vertical parts of the background.

After a few decades of fine tuning positions, timings, particle abundance and fading, we finally arrived at the point you see in the gif. I should’ve never quit law school!

Note: In reality, Teddy loves even the dreary parts of his job, and is quite happy he quit law school!

Next on our interior list, we have the government/administration building (we just keep calling it random things), where your goal is to get a citizenship-emblem in order to progress the story. Since you’re not from Tai Ming, and have only spent a very short while in this town, this might prove harder to get than you’d first hope.

After all, with a several year long wait list to even visit the city, getting citizenship here must be quite hard indeed. But I guess, if you could find another way into the building, there’s a chance you might accidentally happen upon one of those citizenship emblems, and nobody would blame you for keeping it, right?

And finally, there’s this new character – another collector! Since Tai Ming has a Collector’s HQ, it’s only logical that there are a few collectors running around doing collector-y stuff:

Where exactly this guy will appear and what he’ll do hasn’t been decided yet, but it’s likely he’ll be near the Collector’s HQ in map 2 :)