Comments - williamchyr

Glad you found it. I think there are still tricks I can use to make the transition even less noticeable, but I think it's more than sufficient for now.

It does look very cool visually. But only that, it has a practical purpose as well. I don't have a map in the game (I really wanted to minimize HUD), and some playtesters have pointed out that being able to see the same stage in the distance actually serves as a map in a way. You can get a pretty clear sense of how the world is laid out. This was completely unintended on my part.

I haven't decided on whether to have a story line or not. For the first iteration of the game, I made the mistake of working on the story too early, and the mechanics and puzzles ended up being not very good. This time around, I've chosen to focus on mechanics and puzzles first and foremost. There's still a lot of work to be done with this first, but once that's finished, I will begin to think about narrative.

Thank you! No plotline yet. At the moment, I'm just focused on the mechanics and getting the pacing and order of the puzzles right. Once this part is done, I'm planning to spend at least a year polishing up the game. During this time, I will begin to really think about narrative. If it works, it will be in the game. If it doesn't, it won't be.

Hey, the project is not dead. Like RandomHobo587 said, I post mostly on twitter (@willychyr) these days. It just takes so long to format posts here on IndieDB, and I've been incredibly busy, so I've let this slide a bit.

Thank you!

That game was an inspiration earlier in development, specifically the way they would focus on one color at a time throughout the environment.

Me too. I'm still quite attached to the old look, but I think this new art style makes the game stand out a lot more.

Glad to hear that. Thank you!

Glad you found this helpful. I'd say somewhere around 8 - 10 people. Mostly they were developers whose work I was already familiar with, so I could ask them specific questions on how they approached design problems in their own games. It also put a lot of their feedback in context.

Will you be at PAX East? I'll be showing the game as part of the Indie Megabooth there!

Hey, thanks oleomingus! I'm glad at least that progress seems fast to others. For me, it feels like it's going at a snail's pace, mostly because it's a lot of throwing things out and redoing stuff, so I feel like I'm forever designing the intro level. (It's all relative.... haha).

Haha. Thanks, Richard!

Thanks so much! Got several new things in the works that I'm really excited about. Hoping to share it here in the coming weeks.

Water is going to play a really big role in the later part of the game, if I can get the mechanics right. It's hard to explain what's cool in words, as a lot of it is just interesting things that emerge from the mechanics.

However, I'm pretty close to getting the technical stuff right, and once it's almost there, I will put together a video demonstrating some of the cool stuff you can do with water in the game.

Oh yeah, water is going to play a big role in the games. There's a lot of really interesting and unexpected stuff when you start mixing water and gravity manipulation. I haven't talked too much about it yet as there's still a lot of basic technical and design issues to sort out.

Awesome. So happy to hear that. Glad to have caught your interest from the beginning. The thing is, as a one man team, I knew I wouldn't be able to compete with other games in terms of aesthetics, so I tried to go for a very minimalist look and really make up for it in the mechanics. Unfortunately, screenshots alone don't really communicate what the game is about.

However, now that I've got more gameplay footage, I think people will start to really understand what the games is about, and why I'm so excited for it.

Thanks so much! Yeah, someone in the comments section said something similar, like "oh, this looks super basic", but it turns out he only saw the beginning of the video. When I pointed him to some of the interesting emergent gameplay later on, he became really intrigued. And there's so much more. What you seen in this video here is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Glad to hear that! I'll be sharing a video in the coming months that shows more of the creative stuff you can do with the core mechanic, which will give you a much better idea of the gameplay.

Thank you! :)

Yes! I love fog as well. I plan on playing with different skyboxes, to change the color of the sky, change of the feel a bit. Still need to work out the color scheme so that it works with all six floor colors. We'll see.

Thank you! It's all still work-in-progress, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once I get better at optimization, you can expect even bigger and crazier worlds.

Thanks so much! Really appreciate the support. I'm doing in-person playtesting right now to fix as many of the obvious problems as possible, but definitely planning to keep the IndieDB community posted and get feedback when ready.

I'm in NYC for IndieCade East at the moment. I showed the game to a few people and the feedback has been quite positive, so I feel like I'm at least headed in the right direction.

hey! Thanks so much for your interest. Unfortunately, at the moment, I don't really have anything to send out. I think it won't be until later this year when I'll get a playable demo out. The version right now is still super buggy, and I wouldn't want that to be people's first impression. However, if there's anything news, it'll definitely get posted here.

Hey Methodias,

Regarding the issues with the shadows, I'm not sure exactly what's going on, though I do have some theories.

Shadows are only not visible when you're viewing it through a portal. As soon as you step through it, the shadows are visible again.

My guess is it could have something to do with shadow distance in the rendering settings. Basically, because both scenes are loaded at the same time, I simply place them very far apart to prevent overlap. For example, scene A would be at (0, 0, 0), while Scene B would be at (1000, 1000, 1000).

I'm wondering if Unity only draws shadows for things that are within a certain distance from the camera. And so, when the portal is showing you a room in Scene B, the shadows aren't being drawn there, because the room is actually very far away from the camera.

The other place that could be causing the problem could be the reflection shader. I think it doesn't account for shadows and lighting, so those aren't being shown when you're looking through the shader.

Ya, it was super confusing. Especially because you'd have one portal referencing the other. For example, if Portal A and Portal B are connected, and you're in Portal A, I need the mirror image to appear in Portal B. In the code, I'd refer to the other portal as sisterPortal, and there was a lot of sisterPortal of sisterPortal stuff going on back and forth.

Thanks! I totally benefited from Valve talking about the tech behind their portals, so thought I'd to the same. It's also a pretty clever solution, if I do say so myself :)

Thanks! The style is still a work-in-progress, so the final version will be very similar... but better. And yes, I'm using ProBuilder and ProGrids to make the levels. Wonderful tools. I highly recommend both of them if you're doing an 3D level design stuff.

Yeah, I'm really excited. Portals open up a lot of doors (pun intended), especially a lot of the crazy non-euclidean geometry stuff, so I'm looking forward to prototyping and exploring that.

Thanks, Maniakk!