This looks very similar to "Shadow Physics". If you have not seen the game, it was shown off at GDC 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5DjyoDObA). It got a lot of attention and then 3 years later was canceled. Here is a video of the Failure Workshop from GDC 2012 describing what went wrong (click on -> What Happend With Shadow Physics Intro): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015751/The-Failure
I hope the developers can get past the initial "Wow" factor and actually make the game fun to play.
I dunno. Shadow physics had much more visual and gameplay polish when demoed, but Perspective has a simple idea that, without any additional gameplay mechanics, makes for many interesting puzzle mechanics. To me, at least, that is very impressive.
Being more free than Fez ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fez_(video_game) ) to rotate the world to line up traveling lines is somewhat neat. But I suspect this makes level design a Real Challenge. It'll be nice to see that they managed to create nice challenging levels that don't devolve into boringly simple solutions after the for dozen or so puzzles.
I think this is too "analogue" to be fun and has too many degrees of freedom. I found that the more "discrete" and clear a puzzler is, the more I enjoy it. Is there a proper word for what I'm trying to say? Think a chess board with clearly defined squares and moves, vs. a WarHammer-style world where you can freely move anywhere within 5cm. Fez is the former, this is the latter.
I strongly agree with this and mentioned it in my Shadow Physics failure workshop talk (even though it might not have come across as strongly as I wanted it to). It was, I think, one of the strongest shortcomings of the game, and if I was to revisit it I'd make everything (projection, lighting, physics), far more discreet so player's can predict the consequences of their actions instead of guessing through trial and error.
> so player's can predict the consequences of their actions instead of guessing through trial and error.
Is this really what people want? Serious question. I am surprised to see it, because personally I always prefer more freedom and "trial and error" to discreet options and predictability. I hate when there's only "one right way" to do things, enforced by design. But right now I feel like minority.
I think that Angry Birds and World of Goo only work because of their freedom. Chess, Tetris and DROD work because they are beautifully simple and discrete. Minecraft took a "mathy" world to the extreme while AAA games seem to explode in organic freedom. Cut the Rope uses a physics engine but enforces "one right way" through its level design.
Maybe it's not so black and white, but rather designers make parts of a game discrete until it becomes simple enough to be fun. Whatever it is, the complexity of this game concept feels overwhelming to me. It's a bit like this physics-based Tetris, I would try it for fun but only for free and for five minutes.
This doesn't actually look fun to play, but it looks interesting. It's a toy, that could maybe have a game built around it.
Stuff that might make it interesting off the top of my head:
- moving things for the 2D guy to avoid/collect
- moving things for the 3D viewpoint to avoid/collect
- switches for 2D to throw that remove obstructions for 3D, and vice-versa
- sometimes you having to move 2D and 3D at the same time
The biggest thing for me that I can't think of a workaround for offhand is the constant breaking of flow. The video shows you doing like 3 seconds of platforming followed by a context shift into 3 seconds of FPSing.
Hopefully the students behind this have thought of all of these things and many more. Because the idea of "running around imagining Megaman doing his thing across the walls" is a nice adaptation of a thing a lot of people probably did growing up.
Hah, both comments on mine mention Portal. I never played ND but Portal was a blast; we'll see if someone picks this team up and help them make this a full game the way Valve did with ND/Portal.
I really liked ND. There were some elements it had that I thought were cooler. Like the ability to shoot portals through portals if I remember correctly.
I think it can be extremely fun and challenging to play only if the levels are designed right. Angry birds doesn't look like it would be fun, but it's got a great engine and just as importantly it has challenging levels that clearly had a lot of thought put into each one.
When making a game with as much freedom as this, it's too easy to try to make the platform the game, rather than building a game on top of it. Portal is another great example, portal would get so boring after a few minutes if the level designers didn't do their job so well.
I could never get into Angry Birds but yeah, level design is a big part of ANY game. Portal is amazing in part because they tested the HELL out of it and put a LOT of effort into teaching you how to play the game - the tutorial doesn't end until you leave the fire pit, IMHO.
AB also ads a lot of things to the basic "you have a slingshot, knock stuff down" - there's different birds that act differently, different things to hit, etc. Start with one system that's fun to play with for a little while, add complications when it starts to get boring. Right now these folks have, I dunno, the first ten minutes of gameplay.
This is almost a clone of a game called Crush on the PSP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_(video_game). Crush was a lot of fun to play, but they've evolved this a little bit more by making it an FPS. I agree with a lot of posts here that say this degree of freedom might actually make the levels boring and predictable.
So someone blatantly ripped off Mega Man down to the actual look of the character during the jumping animation and decided to stuff their rip-off into the game Echochrome, minus the artistic sensibilities.
It's a fun little puzzle game that operates on rotating the perspective 90° (my kids have been playing it for over a year and seem to keep enjoying it, though I got tired of it after a few levels).
I recently watched the documentary 'Indie Game: the Movie.' While it was great to see small teams make games that sold tens of thousands of copies, some of the devs seemed to have an unwarranted superiority complex about their games vs. mainstream productions. Sure, the big companies often churn out sequels based on the same formulas, but most of these indie games were just riding the coat-tails of 90s platformers. Slapping an edgy theme on a basic platformer and throwing in a couple new gimmicks doesn't make something a transcendent work of art, or competitive with large scale productions. The only game they talked about that seemed genuinely groundbreaking was Minecraft (no pun intended).
Definitely takes some getting used to it, and maybe too many degrees of freedom? What excites me though is to see how the medium "Computer Game" starts to break out of the familiar concepts and stops emulating what has existed before.
The medium emancipates itself from [what?] like photography did from painting with Henry Cartier Bresson and his "decisive moment". At that time photography stopped doing what had been done with painting before (elaborate portraits that required the models to sit still for a long time), and started doing things that painting could not do: freeze the decisive moment in time.
I'm very excited to see all the new things computer games will start doing that we can't even imagine today.
Nice concept. I would like to see a similar 2d projection game integrated in an augmented reality game world, probably in a mobile app. It would require the app to have a basic understanding of the 3D structure of the world, but that is not impossible.
Yeah, I'm not sure what you want to tell, but regarding monocular SLAM, I attended a thesis defense in my lab (LAAS-CNRS) in 2007 with impressive results on a mobile robot. So I think there are chances that good monocular SLAM algorithms get implemented into mobile libraries in some years.
I'll be impressed if this sort of freeform perspective mechanic translates into entertaining gameplay. Seems like that sort of mechanic would be too flexible in a manner that would be detrimental to gameplay.
unrelated to the game itself: Why does "screenshots" link to a zip file with 5 reasonably small png files in it? I mean, sure it works, but that is weak.
I hope the developers can get past the initial "Wow" factor and actually make the game fun to play.