Problem Machine
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And a release version is up! I'll probably spend a few more hours patching some bugs I noticed, but it's probably mostly done now.
https://problemmachine.itch.io/eight-seconds-manipulated-through-time
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Alright got portals working perfectly! Still not entirely sure what was going wrong with my approach, but I found an alternate approach which fits the rendertexture to its destination using shader logic rather than trying to match the UVs which was what I was trying to do. Honestly couldn't be happier with how they look now, though I also had to spend some time getting everything rendering in the right order -- it turned out using separate cameras to handle drawing different layers was key.
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The movement looks really smooth and satisfying, and environments look great
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Ahh good thought, I did make it make the mesh in code using the dimensions of a box collider, I'll fiddle with the triangulation and see what that does.
For the reversal I end up recording the rotation and velocity relative to the character facing at each point in time, and then whenever it lands from falling I record the vertical velocity at the moment of impact and play that back like a jump in reverse. This means that if you pick up your reflection and move them around, their movement will continue relative to the new offset to their position. Unfortunately the backwards jumps don't always work -- if you walk off a platform, when your reflection goes to 'jump' back onto it it usually won't make it. I may just remove jumping as a mechanic.
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Trying to get a portal system, as in the game Portal, and I'm having issues getting it to draw correctly. Anyone know how a render texture applied to a 4-point plane could end up with this bend in the middle?
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Got doors and switches working and constructed a simple adaptive music system, which was surprisingly easy to do (though getting everything to sync up correctly at the start was a bit trickier).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/00ovcxba2bgwuq8/MtT0003.mkv
Physics are still not quite there, as you can see from the red (forward) reflection failing to make the jump I made. I'm a bit tempted to just get rid of jumping instead of fixing the issue.
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Edit: Released!
There's still some bugs left to iron out, but overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out -- even though I don't think it really works as a refined puzzle solver, the experience of repeatedly having a crate snatched out of your hands by yourself from 8 seconds ago is really dumb and good.
https://problemmachine.itch.io/eight-seconds-manipulated-through-time
I should have made this post a few days ago but it slipped my mind. My project for the final Wizard Jam is going to be a surreal first-person puzzle game based around time manipulation. Every eight seconds, a duplicate of you is created and plays the last eight seconds of your actions back in reverse. I have a few ideas for how to iterate on this mechanic, but at this moment relatively few for how to create interesting gameplay, ie puzzles, out of it. I'm hoping to have all the mechanical components complete within the next few days, though, so I should have a solid week or so to get the actual puzzles and levels made.
Here's an earlier version of the time reversal mechanic, along with a demonstration of picking up the time reflection and letting it go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9xvt3e36lf9949f/MtT0002.mp4?dl=0
Working right now on a more physically robust version where the reflection actually interacts with the environment in a meaningful way, which is a bit trickier. I think it's very achievable, though.
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I originally was going to do a game for this but I decided that in the end I'd really rather just help other people out with their thing. I'd like to contribute to as many projects as possible!
What I'm doing:
Music! 2d art/animation! Game design! Unity/Flash/etc programming! I'm not great at 3d art but other than that have a pretty broad skill set. I'd particularly like to do music work though, so hit me up if you need any music for your game.
Contact Info:
PM me here, direct message on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel, or email at problem.machine at gmail
Time Zone:Pacific, sleep schedule currently wildly fluctuating
Portfolio:... And I'm noticing my 2d art portfolio is real out of date, so I probably want to update that before I share it.
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Yeah I spent almost all of my dev time building game elements, and then the last several days were a mad scramble of building, testing, and debugging levels
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I uploaded a 1.01 build tweaking level 6 based on this and jonbjohns' stream. This is the one level with the most specific solution, and I realized watching his stream that the note at the beginning could describe another solution which I wasn't thinking of and which the level wasn't scripted for. There should be more clarity now
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Hoo boy. Well, over the past week I've basically worked 8-12 hours every day trying to bring this thing to life. It's still not quite where I want it to be, but I hit most of my goals. However, to get this finished today I had to basically work for 14 hours, so I'm really looking forward to doing not this for a while.
As of now, we're in 1.0, and the game has 7 levels and an epilogue. The puzzles range from elementary to fairly tricky, though the mechanics aren't quite refined enough to support really elegant puzzle design they do have an organic feel that seems a bit unusual to me.
Anyway, here it is. I may decide to pick this back up in the future just to do another polish pass and maybe add another level or two if I get inspired, but right now I'm pretty proud I got it to where it is now over the course of 3 weeks and also feel like never opening unity again
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Alright, version 0.1 is up! Over the next few days, up until we hit February and I move onto another project, I'll be adding a few more levels and intro screens conveying the objectives. I may be adding in bits of behavior to the civilian and music and additional game elements if that's feasible -- most of those elements are actually already in, but don't work without a civilian who does things.
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It took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally got the UI overlay working. It's technically not an overlay since it's in world space (which is technically probably not ideal), but it's fine for now, so at least I can move on to other things.
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I did some work on materials and pulled in some asset store prefabs to be game objects. These were listed as "sci-fi batteries", but they stand in quite well for generic machines. I've got placeholders for everything in now, and just need to make the machines and civilians actually functional -- probably fairly easy in the case of the machines, likely pretty tricky in the case of the civilians. I also need to create a bit more UI to give feedback on the state of the machines. Once I have that stuff done I'll start building levels (agh so little time), and can develop the objective stuff in parallel with that. I also need to add sound, which will probably be something I do in a mad dash on the last day.
Anyway here's a soul-powered conveyer beam:
It still doesn't convey, so I'll be tackling that tomorrow along with the other stuff I mentioned. The thing I'm happiest about from today is adding a normal map to the aggregator lens. I think the effect is pretty nice.
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Well, the bug with the particle trails ended up costing me a ton of time overall -- first a day trying to fix it, then a few more days of distraction while I communicated with the Unity bug report department and tried to replicate it in other versions of Unity and other hardware configurations (it still happens in Unity 2019 beta but not on my other PC, so it's presumably hardware specific). I also lost more time because I stupidly did not make a backup when I upgraded the project, so it took a while to roll it back to a version that mostly worked and then fix the things that had gotten broken somewhere along the way. So it works again, and most of the gameplay elements are functional: The different ways of manipulating the particle stream all work, and it's possible to move around the level picking them up and moving them and rotating them. The devices the particle stream can power all basically work now, except they don't have any gameplay effect -- but they turn on and off properly. Here's a soul-powered television:
There's a few things left to do to get the basic gameplay functional. The biggest one is to create the Civilian game object, which is going to be the most complex in terms of behavior since it will actually move around under its own power and try to get near things that it finds interesting. After I have that, I need some sort of system for knowing when objectives have been met and transitioning to the next level, I need a way of communicating objectives to the player (I'd like these to be notes which the player can carry around and which either appear on the GUI or just can be held and looked at in-game), I need to finish the conveyer beam, and I need to tweak some issues with highlighting interactive objects, changing their settings. Once I have that stuff done I can create finished levels, though considering how much time is left I may want to start in on the level design before I get there. Music/sound would probably also be nice to have.
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This sounds like a great concept for a pod title that I was shocked hadn't been used yet
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Today sucked. Spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out what was going wrong with my particle system -- any time there was a second camera active in the scene (including reflection probes), which I needed to make the reflective surfaces work, the particle trails would bug out and either get way too big or disappear into a line. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this was probably a Unity bug rather than something I was messing up, so I reported it and can move on with my life.
Next I need to make it so the player can pick up and move objects, then create some mechanisms for them to play with. Still need to finish the code for placing objects. Also need to make some machines to be powered, which I forgot last time. I think the gameplay is largely going to revolve around trying to corral 'Civilians' to where you need them, sort of like Lemmings, and constructing the apparati you need to make that happen.
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Worked on the appearance of the different elements today. Had a lot of trouble getting reflections to work well, and the reflector, which is supposed to look like a big mirror, still kind of doesn't. Other elements are starting to look pretty good, though. I also got the aggregator (the big lens-looking thing) and the reflector (the big rectangle on the right) working, though the effect isn't quite what I'd like it to be. However, right now I have a design issue where the converger's gravity forcefield tends to overwhelm everything else -- you can see that immediately after bouncing off of the reflector they just start to curve right back around, and I had to put the reflector right up against the aggregator here to even demonstrate its functionality. I probably just need to spend a couple of hours carefully tweaking the parameters of the converger's force field, but I may also need to do something weird where the reflector and aggregator actually spawn a different kind of particle which isn't affected by force fields that then switches back to the normal particle after a few seconds.
More immediately, though, I need to get the code for picking up objects and moving them around working. Once I have that and the particle tweaks done I can start building levels!
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Got the particles looking a bit more the part today, and got the collector elements working -- that is, the box on the right is absorbing those souls for power, though so far all it does with that power is output however much of it has to the console. A bit more difficult to see, in this default-texture hell, is the little orb to the left of the box: This is the converger, and is what is making it so those souls are flowing into the box instead of haphazardly around the level. The lens/aggregator and reflector elements are still in progress: I think I need to set them up with their own emitters which, after they collide with a particle, create the same type of particle with the correct new position and direction.
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Spent today experimenting with particles. I currently have the emitter for the soul orb and a gravity well for the converger, and have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to handle the lens/focuser/aggregator (not sure yet on terminology), reflector, and collectors (the machines which are powered). Most of my time, actually, was spent wrestling with the IDE (VSCode), trying to get code completion working properly. Still haven't figured that out, and having to look up every member function is incredibly tedious, so hopefully I can get that ironed out tomorrow.
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Oh I'd be interested in knowing more about that music game if you happen to come up with a name! I had a similar idea for a game based around music at one point and if their idea is close to mine I'd be interested to see how they approached it
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I would be remiss in not throwing my hat in the ring but I'm not sure when it would be and I'm not completely sure I can commit. Maybe I could just start on the beginning of the day Saturday and make a day of it? Not sure yet.
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What if it was multiplayer and the other players were incompetently trying to qwop around to escape the qwopping killer? It's pretty ambitious so maybe better to set as a sort of 'stretch goal', but it is interesting to think about
[Release] Eight Seconds: Manipulated Through Time
in Wizard Jam
Posted
Basically the rules are:
Level 1 - no reflection/echo
Level 2 - 1 echo which repeats what you did 8 seconds ago
Level 3 - 1 reflection which does everything you just did backwards every 8 seconds
Level 4 - 2 and 3 combined. I think there may be some issues with this one, though.
If something was in your hands at the start point of the reflection/echo, a copy of it is made for them to hold
Unfortunately I don't think it really works as a puzzle game since it ends up being so difficult to wrap ones brain around and the easiest solution to the puzzles is usually just to wait for long enough that your reflections/echoes are static and can be used like blocks. I also wrote up some further thoughts on what I was trying to do with this project, and the ways it worked and failed to work, and posted them on my blog:
https://problemmachine.wordpress.com/2020/02/01/eight-seconds-manipulated-through-time/
Thanks for playing!