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.
