Category Lemma

Screenshot Saturday 205

For the first time in the history of Lemma, I'm actually keeping up with my self-assigned pace of one new level per week.

These past two weeks I made two more frost levels. The plan calls for one more frost level, then it's on to the other two biomes.

Both of these levels have interesting quirks and unique features. They're probably too tough right now, but I'm scheduling plenty of time to playtest and sand down the sharp edges.

Screenshot Saturday 203

Big update this week!

My voxel renderer now has the capability to overlay everything with any texture I want. I'm using it on a new set of interconnected winter levels. This way I don't have to manually come up with a frosty version of each texture.

Without giving away too much, this week I built a new system that has implications for both puzzle solving and movement mechanics.

Screenshot Saturday 202

I've come to several realizations this week.

  1. Lemma is going to be good, but not great. I have to accept my limitations and finish the thing to the best of my ability.
  2. Lemma is more of an experience than a traditional video game.

With these two ideas in mind, I am focusing the next few months on making Lemma the least frustrating, most enjoyable experience I can.

So I'm trying to come up with puzzles that seem difficult but are actually simple to solve. The wonderful Monument Valley did a great job of this.

New blog, new app, new screenshots

Lots of stuff going on this week.

New dev blog

First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.

I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to a server, as opposed to Wordpress, which generates fresh HTML every time someone loads your page.

Advantages:

Screenshot Saturday 199

"Level design for days" has been my motto for several months now, and this week is no different.

Behold, new challenge levels! These are timed, bite-sized maps with simple goals that can be completed in under a minute. They're the kind of things you can create in the level editor and share on Steam.

I need to find a new texture for that garish green material.

Lots of other things are happening, but they're more like a million tiny updates rather than a few conveniently screenshot-worthy ones. So that's it for this week! Thanks for reading.

Screenshot Saturday 196

This past weekend I exhibited Lemma at the Ohio Game Dev Expo. It was an awesome time. Extra Life raised over $9,000 for charity (yes, it is in fact over 9000).

The Oculus Rift was a huge hit!

I worked on various improvements right up to the expo. First, some new textures for moving platforms and doors:

This is the first texture I've created that has any kind of directional meaning. The reason is that until this week, I had no control over how the textures mapped to the voxels. It was all procedural. So if I put an arrow graphic in a texture, there was no guarantee which way it would face.

Screenshot Saturday 185

Hello friends. Yesterday I finished the 5th level! It took much longer than anticipated because it's actually 10 separate maps connected together. It includes some simple but hopefully interesting puzzle mechanics.

It also advances the story through notes and several text conversations scattered throughout.

It's hard to see in screenshots, but I added a subtle cloud shadow effect as well. It doesn't respond to the actual clouds, so in a sense it's slightly faked. Because of that I was able to do the projection easily with a ray-plane intersection rather than a full matrix multiplication. Here's the shader code, edited for clarity:

Screenshot Saturday 184

This week was a lot of level design. I'm working on a group of "fractured" but interconnected worlds that the player has to progress through.

Here's a screenshot:

Here's the thread where I got that rock texture. It's a gold mine with a bunch of totally free diffuse, specular, normal, and even displacement maps.

Unfortunately that's all I have time to talk about today. Thanks for reading!

Screenshot Saturday 183

I hit a milestone today.

Three of the four levels so far in Lemma (Rain, Dawn, and Forest) have undergone at least one massive redesign in their short lifetimes. This week I finally gave the same treatment to the fourth level, Monolith. It is aptly named. Let me try to convey just how monolithic this level is now.

This is a perfect example of my patent-pending Design by Trial and Error™ process.

Screenshot Saturday 182

What's that you say? You didn't even notice the absence of Screenshot Saturday last week? How convenient. Let's pretend it never happened. Or rather, pretend that it did. Whatever.

MGDS was a huge success! There was almost always a line to play the game, and I got a ton of useful feedback. Here are some pictures:

Most of the feedback was related to level design. I came home with a phone full of "todo" items. Here are some screenshots of overhauled or brand new sections that resulted: