mtbdesignworks

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:

1. To have true 4D gameplay where players are deeply thinking in 4D as they solve the puzzles
2. 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.

However, the real improvement (which can’t be shown in screenshots) is what it looks like in motion while switching dimensions! And other amazing things not shown in this level which I can’t talk about yet!

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.

Sixteen Indie game studios have combined forces at PAX East forming the Indie MEGABOOTH. Twenty games will be packed in one massive central location, and Miegakure is one of them.

I’m really excited to see people’s reaction to the game. The last playtests we did (including at PAX West for a few hours) went very well, and in the mean time I have made the game more “realistic” in the sense that some of the objects in the game (like trees) were being displayed in a way that was inconsistent with the rest of the game.

It’s really important to me that the game be as consistent as possible, even if it’s just a cosmetic change, as I think it helps players subconsciously develop a better understanding of the rules of the game.

Your conscious mind might not know what a four-dimensional world is supposed to look like, but it can somehow “feel” things, and after the change I made it just feels better. Plus it looks awesome. So we will see how that goes.

See you in Boston at Booth #772!