Month: March 2018

You might have seen a gif that we shared from our twitter account yesterday showing a new mechanic we’ve been working on.

In case you didn’t…

What have here is a mechanic we’re calling Passive Projection.

The idea is a twist on the projection mechanic that we already have in the game. Instead of the player casting the projection from themself, the projection is cast from a stationary block, and can be used to project the player to a different location.

This is essentially using the mechanics that we already have, but twisting them just slightly to open up some new ways of making puzzles.

And this actually gives us two new mechanics. We can create a block that can project other blocks when the player presses a button, as well as a block that projects the player when they are in a particular position. Players can use this to get past solid walls for example.

It’s pretty cool that we are still finding new ways to use the mechanics that we have, and build them out into more complex systems. This is something that we are going to have to do if we want Level Squared to be enjoyable over more than a twenty minute play session.

We have a couple more mechanics that we are investigating at the moment, so hopefully we’ll be able to keep this drip feed of new stuff going!

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And in some super cool news: We’ve made the list of finalists for the Play by Play Festival!

Play by Play is held in Wellington in New Zealand. We are a finalist for the “That Game From Across The Ditch” Award, which is open to games made in Australia.

The other finalists are Florence by Mountains, Rumu by Robot House and The Gardens Between by The Voxel Agents.

This is pretty daunting company to be in for our team, so we’re simultaneously excited and a bit overwhelmed.

I’m going to be heading over the New Zealand in April for the conference and the award ceremony, so if you’re there, keep an eye out for me!

Last week I talked about what we doing this year.

This week, I’m going to talk about some of the hurdles that we have identified, and that are going to make it difficult for us to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.

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First of all, we are a fledgling group of game developers without any experience at running a development company or in developing a product for release. Up to this point, the lion’s share of our development has been done in a class environment, and directed by university course requirements.

That has now ended. We are operating entirely under our own steam, and don’t have to answer to anyone. In addition, we have lost access to a lot of the resources that we had through uni. This includes rooms, computers, software and support services.

This hasn’t caused any significant problems to date, but it’s going to take extra effort by the whole team to make sure we stay focused and on track, and don’t let things slip just because no-one else is keeping an eye on us.

Following on from that, there are a bunch of other problems that come along with being a new development team.

We don’t have any money. So we can’t rent any office space to develop in and we can’t pay ourselves while we develop. And because we can’t afford to pay ourselves, we also can’t afford to not have other jobs (bills still need paying, yo), and that takes a significant amount of potential development time away.

So now we are reduced to doing development in our reduced spare time, and having to meet up whenever we can manage, at whatever place we can find that can fit us in.

Add to that, we are brand new to this, so there is a very good chance that there are a number of things that we don’t even know about yet.

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Hmm, yeah sorry. Not a particularly cheery post this week. (Actually, I did a bit of a trawl through the older posts in the last week, and MAN, those first few weeks were miserable! It’s hard to remember a time when I felt that bad about what we were working on.)

On the brighter side, we are at least aware of these issues, and doing our best to address them as best we can, with the resources available to us.

All we can really do at this point is our best. Accept that we are going to make mistakes, and that this is going to be a hard slog over the course of the year as we try to make this pretty good demo that we have into a great game that thousands (millions?) of people are going to want to buy.

It’s not much fun to take a look at all of the problems that you are facing and just accept that they are going to be problems, but I think it’s better to do that than to bury our heads in the sand and just trust that it’s all going to work out.

Tune in next week for more of these super fun happy times!

So it occurs to me that I haven’t really laid out what’s going to be happening for Level Squared in 2018 so far.

Let’s do that now…

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There’s really not a whole lot to show off visually at the moment. We are continuing to work on Level Squared, with the aim of working it up to a full release. We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, where and when we can.

We’re having to make working on Level Squared fit in with everything else we are already committed to as well, working, uni, family life etc. None of us are getting paid to work on the game at the moment, so that’s having a bit of an impact on our ability to dedicate a huge amount of time.

Some of the work that has been done so far includes:

• A pretty drastic overhaul and refactoring of the majority of our code base. A lot of the systems and mechanics that we had created were fit for purpose with a small demo for PAX, but they weren’t going to be able to be extended to a full length game, or were going to interfere with other systems.
• Developing and writing a proper narrative for the game. There were hints of a narrative in the PAX demo, and a mood was set, but there wasn’t exactly what you would call a full emotional arc.
• Reviewing the art and aesthetics.  Our overall aesthetic was devised in pretty short order, and kept deliberately simple and able to be scaled. But it’s clear that our art style is going to become dull and repetitive over a full length game, so we are reworking it to introduce a bit more variety and distinction. There is also some work to do to better reflect the game’s new narrative.
• And finally, there has been a lot of work going on outside of the game getting various studio things set up and established.

Sorry if some of that is a bit vague. There’s stuff happening, but it’s not really in a position to make public yet.

Hopefully we will have some more substantial news to share in the near future. Until then, I’ll have to keep being vague and mysterious…

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Unfortunately, we’re not going to be heading to GDC this year.

Sorry to disappoint all our legions of international fans, but as a fledgling studio with a total operating budget of $0 we can’t afford to get over there, as much as we would have liked to.

But I know of plenty of people who are heading over, and I’ll be scanning twitter pretty obsessively to keep up with all the goings on!

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And speaking of twitter – keep an eye out, cos I’m gonna have a pretty banging image for the coming screenshot Saturday!