Blogs - thejumpsuits

Another bit of time has gone by ever so fast.

Since our game will be in 3D I decided last week to ignore all 2D concepts for a while and just started to experiment and play around in Unity and Blender. It was a fun and satisfying experience and the results are interesting. I realised that one part of creating games that is very important to me is being able to test out things myself without having to wait on someone else to render my ideas. Of course my skills are sub-par compared to those of our 3D expert but I think my simple attempts will enable me to explain better what I need and want. My favorite of these is the totally unintentional glitch with the caterpillars all connect by weird spikes. I think I want some of that in the release version. I also like the one with the big face is the background even though that one is probably totally unfit regarding level design (not enough overview over the puzzle).

Here are two recent tests. The first one showing my concept drawing in 3D and the second one lazy quick test with the new Unity 5 shaders (because we had to out of sheer curiosity).

This is my first post here but then again, we have been working on our current game for over a year now. During that year we have tried a lot of different things, especially visual approaches and story ideas but what ever we came up with we were not happy. So after many many sketches we decided to pull back and let things simmer for a while.

Mostly because we needed time to think about our approach to the game. By late December 2014 we realised that after more than a year of working on the game we know pretty much what we wanted things to look like but that we still did not know why in many cases we were unhappy with the results. Some of these were rather solid and beautiful but there was always something that did not work. So, we decided to put down the drawing board and think about the game and some of the underlying ideas. It then occured to us that while we tried different visual (and conceptual) solutions in one place we did not try them in all places. One darling always survived (the mushroom-like bridges) and it took us basically 10 months to kill it.

The reason why we kept the functionality of the bridges intact was that it worked so well in the videos that we thought that they shouldn't be changed. What we failed to see was that there could be plenty of similar solutions that would work just as well. The most important aspect here is that the environment should reacts to the characters, e.g. if a red character approaches a blue bridge that bridge will show a response telling the player that this character can not cross. As a result we scrapped the mushroom approach and replaced it with a weird caterpillar: Now the caterpillar reacts to the characters that run across its body. The colour-shape system that we have developed will stay however and it will be implemented via textures, spikes, and other strange extrusions to the caterpillar.

That next important change is that we decided to hire a writer for the story part of the game. We have already found a very capable one and we are excited to see what she will come up with...

Lastly, two of the most recent concepts: A low-poly bonsai and a weird snaking caterpillar worm thing.

Enjoy. More soon.