Cheeseness

Thanks for the kind words, @Simon! If you do check out any of the other games that are using the Icicle engine that I've made (so far, Baboo! and The Good Doctor are the only ones I haven't made), I'd love to hear your thoughts. I was disappointed to miss the stream, but it was great to watch the archive and see the response it elicited both from chat and from Chris, Jake and Nick

Thanks! It's hard for me to see the general concept it as original - I've drawn inspiration from and iterated on a bunch of sources and influences ranging from early text adventures to stuff like Myst and even modern adventure games to a small extent. It feels like a natural answer to "What would a VR friendly text adventure look like?" and I've always been surprised that I've never been able to find anybody who's done anything quite like this. Cheers! Since I'm primarily making the engine for my own game(s), I am placing lower priority on features like object indicators and maps that are likely to undermine the type of experience I'm trying to create. That said, when the engine is ready for release and use by others, I do plan to spend time expanding the feature set to accommodate other developers' needs. The engine (and games using the engine) definitely seem to spark the imagination for what a game about being blind could be like. It's the most common thing I hear people talk about being inspired to make. It's something I've considered trying myself, but it's not something I'd feel comfortable exploring until after I have screen reader support, etc. in place (a game that aims to explore what being sight impaired is like that isn't accessible to sight impaired people feels super inappropriate to me). It's super nice to hear that the game has been accessible to you when other text oriented games haven't been! So far as seeing more games goes, I've got "good" news and I've got "bad" news. The bad news is that I'm not expecting to have the engine ready for release within the next 6 months. The good news is that as part of a small focus group/game jam that I ran earlier this month, I gave a few people (including Ben) early access to the engine and plan to showcase Baboo and the other games that were made soon. If you are looking for more experiences like Baboo and haven't seen them, I've made/am working on 4 games that use this engine, including a demo for Winter's Wake (the game that I started writing the engine for, and at the moment is probably the best demonstration of the engine can do even though it's way overdue for an update to the current engine version). They can be found on the showcase section of the Icicle Engine web page.

Hello! My name's Cheese, and I wrote (or am writing) the engine that Ben X used for Baboo!. First up, I wanted to say congratulations to Ben - releasing something is always an achievement, so well done! It's also be absolutely wonderful to see a non-Cheese-made Icicle game out in the wild, and witnessing its development has contributed some valuable new perspectives that will benefit the engine and its toolset as I move forward. Woohoo! Secondly, I wanted to take a moment to respond to some of the comments on the engine (thank you for these!) and its "nuances". It's definitely more awkward with a touch pad than with a mouse (which the engine has been primarily designed for). I'm not really sure how to address this beyond experimenting with a "joystick" mouse mode where the distance you are from the origin of your touch determines how fast your turn, maybe? Keyboard controls are super rudimentary and the step distance can big enough to "skip over" some in-game objects. I'll be improving this in a later engine build. As Ben mentions, exit alignment is something that has some unexpected side effects. It's not an engine limitation, but it is a design decision that makes some sense. I have a few things I'm planning to implement that will make aligned exist less problematic, but they're still a little way off. If you end up exploring your own multi-dimensional text adventure concept or want to investigate using Icicle for something, get in touch. I'd love to chat Default mouse sensitivity is super tricky to balance. The majority of feedback I've had so far is that it's too high. When I get around to adding a settings menu and in-game controls for adjusting mouse sensitivity, I expect all of that feedback to go away. Keyboard controls are definitely awkward to use at this stage and will be improved in future engine builds around the same time that I add gamepad support. The vertical view range is currently 120 degrees (or full 360 if you're using a HMD - I don't see any value in limiting things there), which I'm making use of in the game that I've been writing the engine for. I hadn't really thought about exposing that as something that developers could customise, but that's definitely an option. My only worry is that with a narrower field of view, it could start to become easy to interpret scenes as some kind of wrapping pannable surface than a 3D space. If it's something you'd like to investigate Ben, it's trivial for me to add it in. Edit: Ben, did you still want me to help you out with getting a build with a better binary name/custom icon together?