So far, I've done about 40+ playtest sessions, and the feedback has been very positive. I'm aiming for about 40-50 puzzles in the final version, with about 6 - 9 hours of gameplay time. There's about 3 hours of gameplay in the latest version of the game. I still need to do a lot of iterating on puzzles to make sure that they're challenging but not unreasonably difficult. However, of those, only about 40 are good, and of those, only about 14 are well-designed and polished. At this point, I have probably designed close to 80 puzzles. Notice how the boxes become active and inactive depending on which field you're in. In the gif below, the player is shifting from the yellow gravity field to the blue gravity filed, and then back again. Aside from a few minor tweaks, I'd say it's pretty close to what I have in mind. CURRENT STATE OF THE GAME Right now, I've got the core game mechanics of shifting gravity field written and pretty well polished. Both are fantastic tools, and I highly recommend them. I'm using ProGrids and ProBuilder for designing levels. Here you can see the progression of the art style over the course of 7 months: - TECHNICAL I'm using Unit圓D to develop the game, and scripting with C#. It's very much a "form follows function" approach to art. Instead, what I do is, I'll implement something quickly so that it's functional and I can test out the game mechanics, then I go through many rounds of iterations, each time adding small details trying to make it a little better. I'm pretty much working on the game completely by myself (everything except music/sound), so it isn't really feasible for me to spend time making concept art. ART STYLE The art style has gone through a number of pretty major changes, and even now, it's still very much a work-in-progress. Eventually everything was rewritten, but this is where it all began. The mechanics wasn't that great, and I spent way too much time choosing textures.
Below is a screenshot from the first prototype. The feedback was pretty encouraging, so I decided to improve upon it and see what would happen. I wrote the demo over the course of four days, and showed it to my roommate and a few friends. The first prototype of Relativity was originally meant to be a quick and dirty project to familiarize myself with Unit圓D. So I had some programming experience, some design experience, some art experience, and wanted to bring everything together. However, I had studied physics in school, and in addition to working in research labs, had also worked in an ad agency as well as an interaction design studio. BACKGROUND I'm primarily an installation artist (you can see some of my work here), so I initially approached game development from a contemporary art perspective. M.C Escher's artwork is a huge inspiration for the game, so you can also expect lots of staircases, and plenty of mindbending visuals. It's a mix of physics-based spatial puzzles (like in Portal), environmental/observation puzzles (like in Myst), and also more cryptic metapuzzles (like in Fez). By turning on and off different gravity fields, you can walk on any visible surface and view the world from different perspectives. Relativity is a first-person exploration adventure puzzle game set in an Escher-esque world with six different gravity fields. Today being the (more or less) one year anniversary of the game's development, I thought it'd be appropriate to celebrate by starting a dev log here. During Thanksgiving of 2012, I started working on a prototype that would eventually become Relativity. Initially, the game was called Relativity.
I'm keeping it here as it is for archival purposes. EDIT: Below is the original post written when I first started the devlog. It was selected as one of the New Yorker’s best games of 2019. Manifold Garden has been nominated for several awards, including “Best Debut” from the Game Developers Choice Awards and BAFTA Game Awards.
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