Not a Clone Update: Make Me Happy

After some technical difficulties with our weekly live-stream last Tuesday (May 3rd, 3:00 PM EDT), we’ve successfully integrated Astra Wijaya’s artwork to the comical animal caring simulator, Make Me Happy. Or is it a complimenting-a-classmate simulator? You decide!

Make Me Happy success

Such a romantic micro-game wouldn’t be complete without any heartbreaks! Fortunately, we deliver on that front, too:

Make Me Happy fail 2

As always, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/64383068. Next Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (at twitch.tv/japtar10101) will cover one of the last two sketches we’ve posted so stay tuned!

Stop Asking Me Unity VR questions! The Hidden in Plain Sight Post-Mortem

In-between making a game for Ludum Dare game jam, we were also responsible for organizing the Tech Valley Game Space Ludum Dare real-world meeting, and acting as a tutor for the Unity application in a VR Hackathon at Tech Valley Center of Gravity. While we have dealt with being an organizer and making a game at the same time in the past, it turns out being also a tutor for this jam proved to be a difficult task to juggle. Looking back, it feels like a miracle that a decently popular puzzle would come out of this hectic and stressful schedule. Here is the Hidden in Plain Sight post-mortem!

What is Hidden in Plain Sight

Hidden in Plain Sight is a 3D puzzle-platformer where the player character is, by default, invisible. Her silhouette, however, reveals an invisible dimension (similar to the Lens of Truth from the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) that she can interact with. Most puzzles rely on using the proper camera angles and character placement to simultaneously reveal the character, and navigate and/or use invisible elements in the game.

What went right

Taking inspirations outside of video games

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hidden in Plain Sight‘s visuals are strongly inspired by René Magritte’s paintings, such as La Grande Famille:

While the visuals themselves may be well-trodden ground for the art world, putting them into a game form created an innovative experience for many players, such as the Let’s Play posted above.

Using built-in Unity features to implement the visuals

More surprisingly, putting together this “cut-out” visual effect was actually quite easy. The result is from a clever combination of using multiple cameras, render textures, and UI mask element, as revealed in this Twitch video: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/63371555.

UI Mask

We did try to create a set of shaders for better performance, but quickly abandoned it when realizing we were neither knowledgeable nor quick enough to put it together in a short time frame.

Experiment early, experiment often

During the second of the four-day development, we spent an ample amount of time experimenting with this visual effect. Those following our Twitter account may recall this animated GIF below:

ldjam35-1

At this time, we discovered a number of important attributes with our game:

Polishing the visual language

The most basic rule in the game, “only objects you see through your character can be interacted,” was actually not finalized until the third day of development. Originally, any object regardless of how it was made visible could be material…or not. After a lot of experimentation, we realized that we ourselves couldn’t figure out what was interactive, and what wasn’t. To fix this, we implemented the rule above to create a more consistent visual-to-interaction language.

We also experimented with creating other methods of figuring out where your character was, such as creating a small cloud wherever she stood. We removed those details, however, when one of our play-testers pointed out that not being able to know where your character is all the time felt like a vital aspect of the game’s experience. Instead, we made interactive objects large and obvious from a distance, especially if they’re invisible.

big switches

We wanted to make sure the effort of finding that one switch was as fair as possible, so on top of making them large, we added a line that connects them to the door they activate, allowing the player to trace back the switch’s place.

Keeping platforming to a minimum

Having an invisible character poses a number of challenges that we had to work within. For example, we kept the platforming easy and to a minimum. Since your character is invisible in most locations, it’s difficult to gauge her position, and thus making the platforming difficult. Even with easy platforming, we went an extra mile to add mid-air controls that were missing in Unity’s Standard Asset 3rd-person controller script, so jumping would feel more natural.

What needs improvement

Less volunteering, more time to work

Those who saw our time-lapse video may have found the introduction to it really strange: instead of showing our brainstorming or development process, it shows a bunch of slides on how to create Unity VR applications.

In fact, we had volunteered to teach how to make VR applications to a hackathon occurring at the same place and time as our game jam. Fortunately for everyone involved in both events, the organizers were able to manage ourselves to different rooms, minimizing any possible annoyances. Unfortunately for volunteers such as ourselves, some of our time were taken helping both events, even if we were also working on a submission for either events. In our case, this manifested in answering any Unity VR questions, including giving a presentation at the beginning of the second day of Ludum Dare. The time loss wouldn’t have been such a big issue if we’ve allocated our time and efforts accordingly. Sadly we did not. Instead we were hit with the dreaded…

Feature creep

By the third day of development, we started adding multiple different invisible characters.

ldjam35-2

Originally, the game was meant to be about making human connections. In that sense, the non-interactive NPCs in the final game was a deliberate mechanic to emphasize how lonely your character is. To counteract this rather depressing fact, we tried to create Pikmin-like helpers that followed your character around. This feature, as with many other ideas such as switches that requires more than one person to hold down and an actual storyline had to be scrapped, despite a ton of time being spent on each of those features. This was easily the biggest time loss, and one we’re guilty of not-quite-learning.

Unclear visual cues

Notice the weird off-color floor in the screenshot below? That’s the area the movable block can be moved around.

Block Tracks

Practically no one understood that’s what the off-color floor stood for. For all the effort we’ve put into polishing the presentation and readability of the game, there are many places where we failed to portray what the visuals meant effectively. And that’s before we get into the (very few) platforming sections in the game. While the screenshot above provides a near-perfect solution to make it clear your character is walking on top of the block, we don’t use the same solution for the platforms themselves. Instead, the platforms in the final game looks exactly the same regardless of whether you’re looking through the character or not, resulting in this monstrosity:

impossible platforming

Leaving level and audio design to the last day

Due to all the feature creep, we’ve left level construction and audio polish to the very last day of development. This lead to a very short and unpolished game, such as blocks being pushed not necessarily playing the push sound effect, or the gap in the last level that makes the world beyond the walls in plain sight. Given how rushed the level design was, it sometimes surprises us when someone compliments how they liked the game.

Edit: Research the title before posting

As many people have notified us, there is already another game named Hidden in Plain Sight by Adam Spragg (note: it plays nothing like our game). Obviously, we should have researched the title properly before posting it on various web portals.

What to do next

Like most game jammers, time wasted in things that does not show up in the final product has been our biggest stumble block. We definitely need to divide our volunteering time more smartly so it would not conflict with a game jam, or else we’ll leave more than one person disgruntled. We should also be quicker at abandoning time-consuming tasks, and design around the lack of that feature.

While our experimentation time is serving us well in identifying some issues early, it failed to find other problems that became more obvious once the levels were laid out. As such, we should allocate more play-testing sessions to find them more easily, especially after some of the levels are constructed.

The Not a Clone Update to Unlock All Secrets

Our weekly live-stream continued last Tuesday (April 26th, 3:00 PM EDT) with a completion of Unlock, the handy puzzle micro-game about moving a key out of its keyhole. The end result? We’ve successfully integrated Astra Wijaya’s artwork to a thrilling tale of thievery:

unlock

For those interested, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/63164094. This still leaves one more sketch from last week’s Not a Clone post, which will be the highlight of this Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (twitch.tv/japtar10101). That said, we still have more new sketches!

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“How I made the graphics in Hidden in Plain Sight” live-stream at 3:00 PM EDT

Hey, all! I’ll be giving a tutorial on how I created the cut-out effects in Hidden in Plain Sight at twitch.tv/japtar10101 on 3:00 PM EDT today. I’ll actually be re-creating the effect from scratch, so you get to see how little programming I used to create this neat effect. Edit: stream is over, but you can see the recording below:

For those who will miss it, I will be exporting the same video and posting it on Youtube in the near-future. So stay tuned!

P.S. I’m also streaming tomorrow, 7:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, this time playing your games!

Streaming How to make the graphics for Hidden in Plain Sight, Thursday, 3:00 PM EDT

Let’s try something new, shall we? Rather than making a long text-based post explaining how we created the crazy cut-out effects in Hidden in Plain Sight, We figured doing a live-stream on Twitch would be easier to understand.

ldjam35 final2

So for those interested, make sure you jot down this date on your calendar: We’ll be streaming this Thursday, 3:00 PM EDT, at twitch.tv/japtar10101. Don’t worry, this stream will not be very technical!

P.S. We also streaming every Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101, to show off our development for Not a Clone.

More mysterious microgame sketches approaches!

Last post, we’ve mentioned we would stream last Tuesday at 3:00 PM EST. Unfortunately, due to a schedule conflict, were we not able to stream that day (we did stream ourselves playing Ludum Dare 35 games, though). On the plus side, we did release a new game during the game jam!

We will be busy handling Ludum Dare-related business for the next two weeks, but we do have a few updates on Not a Clone. As usual, Astra Wijaya put together a few sketches for the next set of microgames we’ll be working on:

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Screen_Shot_2016-04-13_at_14.30.30_

What will these microgames be? Tune in next week to find out!

Edit: Oh, whoops, we forgot to mention that Pushing Buttons is now done:

pushingButtons

New Ludum Dare game: Hidden in Plain Sight

Ludum Dare 35 has come and gone, but not without a new game! We’ve attended the Jam (team development challenge) to try something completely different: make a surreal puzzle-platformer where your character’s silhouette reveals a hidden world. The journey was full of treachery and danger (read: distractions), but we finished what we set off to do! Our new game is Hidden in Plain Sight, created solo by Taro Omiya. Oh yeah it’s open-source, too!

Full Description:

A lone woman finds herself stuck in-between two dimensions, and only you can help! Guide this person to salvation using environmental cues and your own smarts. Hidden in Plain Sight is a unique puzzle-platformer where your character itself reveals a new hidden world. Use the visual cues in both the real and hidden to navigate through this treacherous world!

Note: a 3-button mouse (mouses with scroll wheels) is necessary to play.

Controls:
* WASD to move
* Space to jump
* Left-Ctrl to crouch and crawl
* Move the mouse to look around
* Use mouse scroll-wheel to zoom in and out
* Esc to pause

Created in:
* Engine: Unity
* Graphics: a combination of Unity Standard Assets, Unity-chan (Candy Rock version) and Autodesk’s free Character Generator.
* Music: GarageBand, something I made a few days ago
* Sound Effects: Unity Standard Assets and BFXR
* Font: Fira-Sans by Mozilla

This game is funded through Patreon. Many thanks to the following:
* Adam R. Vierra
* Joshua Jennings
* XanderHD
* Tommy Pedersen
* Jacob Clark

Made in Tech Valley Game Space!

If you can, please rate the game, and let us know what you think!

Link to Itch.io: https://omiyagames.itch.io/hidden-in-plain-sight

Link to GameJolt: http://gamejolt.com/games/hidden-in-plain-sight/142011

Link to Ludum Dare voting page: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=20557

Some screenshots!

We’ll be game jamming at Ludum Dare 35!

Hello, all. We’ll be attending the Ludum Dare 35 this weekend, the largest online game jam where those attending takes the challenge of making a game in 72 hours or less. Like previous Ludum Dares, we’ll hopefully have a new game at the end of this event, so stay tuned! If you’d like to follow our activity during the weekend, we’ll be posting on the Ludum Dare website under the Omiya Games account.

As a reminder, our previous games from Ludum Dare includes:

hack.source.net

hackSourceNet4

Can I Haz Monsters?

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Star Driller Ultra

starDrillUltraAnimated1

Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator

animated2

Laundry Day

20557-shot2

The Sentient Cube

The Sentient Cube