PAX East went very well. The vast majority of players seemed to just blaze through the introductory levels, and while I was expecting something like that from previous playtests, having hundreds of people play the game over the course of three days certainly gives enough data to be sure. Even then, I was still making tweaks to the game every day, sometimes on my laptop during the show itself!
Notably, Stephen Totilo of Kotaku came by to capture some new footage and discuss the game. Here’s the link to the video.
Wacky gameplay suggestion:
A stage in which the fourth dimension replaces the dimension of height.
The only problem I see to this, is that the player character may fall infinitely when exchanging dimensions (as exchanging dimensions changes which cells are below him).
This can be avoided, though, by making the bottom world a giant solid rock.
That’d make gameplay rather different.
If you can swap up/down with some other dimension, then what was the top face of the hypercube you stand on is now the side. Thus, you could essentially walk up walls. There goes the “move the block outside the temple so you can use it as a stepping stone to the goal” idea.
Let Marc to release the currrent game format first, then feed him more strange notions, please. 😉
Hi! I was at pax east and I played the game for about a solid hour on Day 1, made it to rotation before I had to stop because I had been playing too long on too little sleep! It was a lot of fun but I was wondering…
Is there any way you could put in some sort of 4d object being externally pushed/pulled/rotated in the game? I was thinking of how it might help for visualization (especially if it was repetitive), just in the same way that a person passing through flatland would be a bizarrely changing shape in 2 dimensions, what would a 4d shape passing through a 3d plane look like?
This was mostly something where when I pushed a block into an area with a person they said “It just came out of nowhere!” and I never got to experience that perspective of “what the heck is going on?!” Especially since the player can also look behind the curtain and see what’s pushing it in the 4th dimension.
Anyway, keep up the good work! Can’t wait to play it!
I guess the windmill and those creatures which appear as abstract changing shapes are meant to demonstrate those kinds of interactions but… eh, I dunno… I kind of want a 4d piston attached to a block or something, and watch a block pop in and out of existence…
Or something… whatever… I’m going to stop rambling now!
@Kit Yes, that makes sense. Something like that is planned.
I really think it would be awesome if this game had a level editor – I can’t even imagine all the awesome 4D levels that would ensue