The Puzzleverse: Hunab Ku news

Hello there everyone!

I realize it has been more than a year since I last tended to my IndieDB profile.
Within the past year I have reached many milestones, and I think it’s about time for me to start writing articles and sharing my progress on The Puzzleverse again.

After having had The Puzzleverse Greenlit last year, I hit the ground running in an attempt to achieve my proposed release date of third quarter 2018. Unfortunately life has a way of throwing many curve balls at you - some of which you can swing and hit, others you swing and miss entirely. It has been a proper year of ups, downs, highs, lows, late nights, early mornings, balancing life, a day job, down time and an endless void of chasing goal after goal in an attempt to achieve my true passion of becoming a game dev. None the less, I have learned much over the last year and I have made considerable progress on the game - which I am excited to share with you today.

As it stands, I have completed the core of the 155 puzzles that are to be included in the first release of the game. When I took on the challenge of completing these puzzles within a year I had a gut feel that it would be extremely tight - I did however not realize how much of a challenge it would actually turn out to be!

While the main branch of puzzles have been completed (all solutions recorded and safely tucked away) it equates to being about 60% of the way through the development of the entire game.

Each of the 12 constellations (The 13th excluded) have what I call Fragment Challenges (Previously known as Wormhole Challenges). These challenges are focused around our main character - Orb - physically catching one of the 12 fragments required to unlock the center of The Puzzleverse (Hunab Ku).

The fragment challenges get progressively more difficult, and as such the player is required to seek aid in order to make these challenges a little more comfortable. Aid for these challenges come in the form of upgrades (Max Health, Max Energy, Health Regen Rate etc) - and these upgrades are “locked” away in “mini off shoot” puzzles scattered throughout the main branch of puzzles:

In the screen shot above, the goal is located on the right side of the puzzle - while a Shield Energy Use Decrease Upgrade is located at the top of the Puzzle. The game does not force you to collect these upgrades, however believe me you will need to at some point. All of these upgrades will be introduced to you in time through a separate series of focused articles.

With the progress of these upgrade placements coming along nicely, I am focusing time on bringing the challenges to life. Given the myriad of upgrades currently in circulation (and those yet still to come) a good balancing on the difficulty of these challenges will be needed - so I still have a good amount of work ahead of me to get the game to a playable beta stage.

Right, short and sweet for now! Before I sign off I would also like to present an updated teaser trailer:

And: For those following my social feeds (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) - I have started a series of short video clips (The Puzzleverse Game Elements Series) which introduce you to the puzzle elements that you can expect to find within the game - the clips also feature short snippets of the game's OST which, is in my opinion, is absolutely phenomenal :D.

In the next article I will be kicking off this Game Elements Series - so please do stay tuned as the game and its various elements are introduced to you.

Till then, hope you all have a fantastic week!
Robert