A note if you are going to GDC: I will be showing Miegakure at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop on Friday at 2:30pm. I will be showing the work we have done recently on the visuals, as well as some awesome gameplay mechanics that we have never yet shown publicly. The game actually premiered there a few years ago, so it’s gonna be pretty crazy and exciting to show how far we have come.
And now, here is a sort of progress report…
Miegakure has two goals:
- To have true 4D gameplay where players are deeply thinking in 4D as they solve the puzzles
- To show what a 4D universe could look like, as seen from the point of view of a 3D being
The first part of the development focused on the first goal. This involved coming up with good mechanics and puzzles, but the majority of the work was to refine the game’s progression. Watching tons of people play the game (friends, or at conferences and expos) and adjusting the game in response, such as moving levels around and creating new ones to fill gaps in understanding.
I felt good about the first goal, so I switched focus to the second goal. Initially the game could only display simple 4D shapes and more visually complex 3D models embedded in 4D space in a simple way. Since then, I made it possible for the game to display arbitrary 4D objects. I also radically improved the display behavior of the 3D objects embedded in 4D. It is not only more accurate –for some definition of accurate that I had to figure out– it also just looks so much better and feels so much smoother, especially while swapping dimensions.
A great and interesting thing is that by improving the graphics, gameplay is improved in the process. Since the graphics are largely what players use to understand how 4D space works, the more accurate they are the more accurately they can be used as gameplay cues. Some of these cues may only be picked up at a subconscious level, which is why accuracy becomes so important.
So any ideas on a rough beta date? I feel like it’s been years… :O
Good luck at GDC. I hope you get some great feedback. I’m sure everyone will be extremely excited. Any chance there will be video or images from the event to showcase the updates and new additions?
I am very eager for Miegakure to come out and am following the progress closely. Thank you for the update.
What change did you make so that you can now display any arbitrary 4D object? Did that involve rebuilding the game engine completely or was it an improvement you planned from the beginning?
@Ryan It was just an additional thing to render, no need to rebuild the engine.
Good stuff. It all sounds great.
It has been an exceptionally long time waiting for a release now, or even a release estimate. As cool as the game could be, it’s difficult to get excited about it after several years of patience. Everyone who reads these updates are loyal fans. Would it be possible to provide us with even a remotely possible, approximate release period? It should only take a moment to calculate. (For example, you must know it will take less than # years, and longer than # months.)
Regards
I’m curious, did you try to render/play your game on a 3D screen? How does that feel, is it more or less intuititve? We would be playing a 4D game represented in 3D drawn on a 2D surface. Headaches incoming.
@glyn good indie games take a long time to make, that is just how it is. Knowing the release date isn’t going to change anything.
@damien you mean like a 3DS screen? I haven’t tried but I don’t think it would be too different as we already perceive the 3d pretty well I think.
I have a question, I don’t know if it’ll make sense but here I go.
When a computer is rendering 3d objects, it is actually rendering graphs with three axes, right? Like x,y,z for example, and thus using three dimensions.
And what you do with Miegakure is adding a fourth axis, and making any three axes active at one time?
@Jorge yes that’s correct
Excellent! Glad to hear there’s still improvement, such a concept deserves it. But I let me bore you with my questions: the player sees a 2-D projection of a (3+1)-D space, (or 3-D, I guess). But the “real” space is a 4-D one. So what is “going forward” (or backward) ? Do you go from (x1,y1,z1,w1) to (x2,y2,z2,w2), thus switching dimensions as you go “forward” ? Or from (x1,y1,z1,w1) to, say, (x2,y2,z2,w1), and you swap Oxyz to Oxyw to go from (x2,y2,z2,w1) to (x2,y2,z2,w2) ?
Thanks !
@Pablo Since Marc hasn’t replied yet I thought I might give this one a try. Firstly I think your idea of going ‘forward’ is a little odd. If you talk about moving forward along the x-axis in 3D space starting at (0,0,0) you would move to (1,0,0), not (1,1,1) as you seemed to imply. A move to (1,1,1) would generally be considered a diagonal movement.
Having not played even a demo of the game I don’t know if it would be possible to move from (0,0,0,0) to (1,1,1,1) in one simply movement (i suspect that this would have to be achieved in two steps although I’ll let Marc answer that one). Moving ‘forward’ (the way I’d define it) should still be easily possible and would look something like a translation from (0,0,0,0) to (1,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0), (0,0,1,0) OR (0,0,0,1), however one of these would be more like a ‘jump’.
If any of this is wildly incorrect or just downright stupid, I hope Marc will correct me 😛
Pablo’s second idea is pretty close to it. Yeah, to move diagonally in all the axes you would have to take two steps. You start in a state where you can move in x,y, and z. Then you can swap y for w, so you can move in x,w, and z.
@Joe,Marc Thanks for the replies, I get it now. As for going “forward”, with quotation marks, I was thinking from the observer point of view, whom hasn’t any info about the axes. I realize that my formulation was a bit clumsy 🙂 thanks anyway, looking forward (really this time) to play.
I am crossing my fingers that this post will actually be seen, because I had a question occur to me and I am not sure where else to ask. From what I’ve seen whenever the player rotates the view through the 4th dimension, it’s the same two axis by 90 degrees. Now I understand why you would only allow the same two axis for game play reasons, but I am wondering if you ever thought about allowing rotations of 45 degrees or maybe just for fun any amount, and if you did was there a particular reason you did not include them? Did you ever try it?
Hi! The game doesn’t care what the angle is: I can just stop the rotation at 45 degrees or whatever angle. I have tried it for fun, but I’m not convinced it will add anything major to the game. Still thinking about it.
Nice! So when it’s rotated at 45 degrees are the tiles longer as if they’re the diagonal of a square instead of an edge? I am not sure about everyone else, but it would help me believe the world was 100% 4D if I could play with that. Also I know you get plenty of pressure to finish the game, so I’ll avoid giving you any pressure when I say: when I was 12 my chosen screen name was 4th_dimention (I realized eventually i spelled it wrong.) Needless to say I am really psyched to play this.
Yeah, they can be longer, or shorter if the slice is closer to a corner. You can actually see that during the transition (while the angle changes).
Good point about the 100% 4D thing. There are a ton of objects that are not tesseracts now; they also help making the world clearly 4D.