fabian

Very cool! Also, good idea to be a little more forgiving when the player is leaning. How far are you planning to take the game visually (I mean these game dev textures are a nice aesthetic on their own, don't get me wrong!)

Haha thanks Well, I'm probably not going to put the project online, but I can go into more detail on specific things if you want, just ask what is the most interesting to you! Though I'm not sure if I'm a great learning source as I feel like a Unity noob myself all the time ---- Quick update: Yesterday I made the last game mechanic I wanted to implement which means I can create a game around them now. So this is exactly what I'm trying to do next!

That looks more and more solid with each update! ... is that a leaning mechanic like in Alien: Isolation or Soma?

Oh god... please don't forget us people with motion sickness The breathing looks so cool!

Today I worked on another puzzle mechanic. It's rather simple because it's just a rotating object, but I hope that in combination with the other mechanics, it will be at least a tiny bit challenging. I somehow managed to fix the animation problem, too. I don't exactly know how, but my character imports fine now There is one last mechanic that I want to get in there before I start building the levels. It's still a lot of time, but for now, I'll focus on getting a small number of levels done and will implement anything story-related if time allows at the end.

Yup did something like that --- Today I spent the whole day with modeling, rigging and animating. I have a few characters but they mostly use one rig, so it was a lot of weight painting... which is an activity I came to loathe. Also, my animation-to-Unity workflow isn't really ideal, because there are always bones not correctly assigned or they import with weird rotations that are hard to fix inside Unity. However, I did fix my run animation to a point where I'm very happy and it comes close to what I originally authored, but maybe I should not depend on Cinema 4D too much in the future and learn a more established game dev 3D software? I don't know.. Nevertheless, I'm very happy with how the little guy is running from A to B, always fun to make things actually move! https://i.imgur.com/Ixr1QTS.gifv

I love the combination of detailed fore- and more abstract background here. Your art looks amazing!

Worked a bit on the visuals and small narrative elements I still need to add some sort of feedback for the player when they can't move a platform because it reached its highest or lowest allowed position. Maybe a small animation like that little bounce when you move the platforms.

This looks satisfying! You could make the sliding/physics part of a puzzle so you have to throw the disc somewhere where it slides down to the needed location or something

I like it when things follow other things in video games. Game looks

Looking good already, I like those big glowing eyes! Just an idea, but maybe the whole animation could be a little bit faster overall?

Thanks! Yeah I like the 90 degree turns as well Oh god, you are right! Wouldn't giant hands holding a sausage be a nice spin on the narrative? Thanks, wow that game looks very intriguing! I think I will do a bit of work on the visuals. I like them currently, but I'm not sure if I want to go further into that Monument Valley aesthetic. I love it, but it also feels like reproduction sometimes. I already have an idea which also involves a tiny narrative, so I'll see where I get with this Thx! Having two weeks off from work sure helps === Yesterday I made a new mechanic where a platform is not walkable until it is exposed to a "laser". Later I want to add 90-degree rotation to platforms as well, so the laser can be raised and turned. I think I can re-use the code of my camera script for that. I'm also rewriting my platform-raising scripts to work with DOTween, so the platforms will have eased movements, which in my opinion feels much better Here's a gif of the laser mechanic: https://i.imgur.com/6IZ6JGu.gifv

That looks incredible! Haven't heard about this game before. Yeah, I'm having my eyes on your thread as well --- So yesterday I figured out the whole dynamic navmesh problem and it now regenerates after each change made by the player. I also worked on the actual movement of the platforms, they're not popping into their new position anymore, but instead move there smoothly. I added another game mechanic as well that already makes things a little bit more complicated. Here's the current state: (the yellow circle around the cursor is from my screen capture program ) The idea behind this mechanic is pretty clear I think. There are two connected platforms that move in opposite directions. I only need to find a way to connect those connected platforms visually. Currently, it seems a bit random. But right now I'm taking a break from game mechanics and will explore a layer of narrative and the overall aesthetics of the game. I like the simplistic style of the gif above and if nothing else works it'll be a nice "fallback"-style, but I want to try a few things.

Oh wow that sounds really promising! Also cool that you teamed up, are you both doing „everything“ or do you split tasks?

Today I worked a lot on my camera system. Thanks to being pointed at the free Unity asset Dotween by @phill I was able to make a system working almost exactly as I wanted. I decided to make the whole thing orthographic and turn the camera in 90-degree steps, I think this limitation could be interesting when I get to design the puzzles. Originally I wanted to have a normal perspective camera with free orbiting- and zoom-capabilities, but after prototyping that I found it to feel weird and floaty and generally uninteresting, so I came up with this more stylized solution. I also implemented two camera-"modes". One focuses on the puzzle itself and the other one follows the player character. Thanks to Cinemachine they also blend nicely when I switch from one to the other. Here's the current state of the camera system in action: I'm quite happy with today's progress. Tomorrow I'll look into more advanced navmesh-stuff. I got the basic functionality working, so my character moves, but I need to find a way to make it somehow dynamic.

Good luck with this! Will play/playtest for sure

Looking forward to this as well, I like your aesthetics very much!

Haha, yeah me too! I haven‘t gotten to sketching some ideas, but I want to avoid the rather normal/realistic human shapes and proportions that I did last jam. Though the character will be very small in the camera view, so maybe I shouldn‘t focus on it that much. I played Far: Lone Sails recently and they did a very good job with a quite simple character, so I hope I can do something along those lines. Hmm, if that won‘t work I guess I need to re-think the whole idea, because the mechanics I have in mind would depend on it. Tomorrow I‘ll finally start working and begin with the whole navmesh topic. Fingers crossed it will work, somehow! 😄

As a mandatory diversifier I‘d suggest that atte‘s brilliant new and now official logo has to be used in the submission somewhere.

The game is now released and you can download it on itch.io! https://fabiandenter.itch.io/the-world-begins-with-you Thank you for checking it out! ---------- Original Post: ---------- After doing a first person game with attempted realistic graphics for WJ5, I want to do something different this time. Sooo... I'll try to make a third person game with some sort of stylized/lowpoly aesthetic. I haven't decided yet, but I think it's going to be mostly top down exploration stuff, maybe with some short platforming areas. Also something with mazes, because I like mazes. The title is borrowed from Idle Weekend episode "The World Ends (and Begins) With You". In terms of story and atmosphere I want to do something "darker" and personal, but abstract. Think of something along the lines of Inside, but with more color? I don't know yet, still very vague ideas here. Robots will of course be in there as well and you'll be able to speak to them, at least that's planned. Like WJ5 this will be an art-heavy thing for me as I'm still more on the environment art side of things, but I worked a bit on my understanding of c#, so let's see where this takes me. However, I will be using a third person controller asset from the store, but will try to do do the rest of the gameplay myself. I even have a puzzle in my mind that I think I'd be able to code ... at least theoretically. I also already experimented with a speechbubble system and that crashed Unity, so there we go I expect time to be the most crucial factor. Last time I had he whole two weeks off from work, this time it's the last week of the year. But then again it's the week between Christmas and New Year's, so there isn't as much time as I'd like to have. But I'm still optimistic that I can put something together!

Thanks for sharing, gotta fix that soon. The sassy players find the most bugs so they are very appreciated!

Congratulations, you found the secret ending! (wtf?! )

Have to give shout outs for the music again here, very nice

I saw this game being solved by a smarter person than I am and now I understand the hint of course Great little puzzle game with a great/terrifying reward at the end!

Thanks for the feedback and kind words! Your feedback mirrors what I saw from let's plays and playthroughs so far and I agree on almost all of them. The most common things people say are the camera doesn't work very good with platforming and the boat ride is too long if you fail in a run and have to do it again and also that the searchlight mechanic comes too abrupt. I think both points are very true. I think the platforming would work with this kind of camera if it wasn't full 3D but 2.5D (like e.g. Inside), where the character only can walk left or right on a straight line. One issue with my camera is that the controls are always relative to the camera perspective and the camera is always "lagging behind" a bit, so this causes the direction of a jump to change midair, although the input by the user may not have changed. That's also why I think playing with a gamepad helps a lot because most of the time you adjust the analog stick's position automatically which is not really possible with wasd on a keyboard. I think we can all agree on cameras being very hard The boat thing would be less frustrating if I had checkpoints between each light, so you wouldn't have that long beginning phase where nothing really happens each time you try. Unfortunately I'm not a good enough programmer to figure out how to make a checkpoint with the player being on a moving object. For now I added a 4th searchlight before the boat section, so after passing that the player should know he can stand behind larger objects and has to crouch behind smaller objects to avoid being spottet. My hope is that players then see the boat and apply that new knowledge when they see the searchlight on the water. Not ideal, but I think better than in v1.0.0 Regarding the maze I agree that it's a) too large / has too long ways to go and b) a bit hard to see the character at times because of the tone in tone color palette and the light effects. I probably won't change it though, because it seems like it's split 50:50 between people liking and not liking it. Regarding the second maze I think it's true that the character is sometimes hard to see. But that's also kind of by design, because actually you see where he is because the columns show it. I experimented with a higher camera angle, but thought the effect of the raising blocks wasn't that good. Also, if people get somewhat lost in a maze, isn't that a good thing? -- I really, really like the feedback (positive and negative) so far! There are some interesting discussions about many things and I already learned a hell of a lot about why certain things work and certain other things don't and how I could improve them. So thanks for everyone who took the time to write something down!