Iris' sand magic is serious and should never be used for fun

Fire beams are ineffective against Gemini’s sand replica, but not so much to herself...

The past week has mostly involved drawing new tile sets, animations, and making the world feel less static than it used to. Here, Gemini is finally walking in and out of doors!

Because of Tumblr’s 1 MB GIF limit, most of the work I record can’t really be uploaded here. I’m still using this blog to post substantial content, but if you want more frequent, smaller updates, I’m also posting to Twitter!

First pics of Iris! Armless magic cyclops. Gemini's mid-game boss? Ally? Frenemy?? For the sake of the game’s story I’m probably going to leave their description at that.

I designed Iris very shortly after starting work on Gemini, and I think Ana’s announcement in Overwatch may have greatly influenced it

I wrote a short article about basic and effective use of game juice!

Later in the story, Gemini discovers a powerful artefact that lets her summon a sand replica of herself, which can be controlled separately.

The replica can do everything Gemini can except talk or finish the level, and if the replica dies, Gemini can summon another one. This really opens up room for a ton of interesting puzzles!

Earlier I mentioned there’d be some core changes to the gameplay! Here’s a lengthy summary for keen followers:

Stones, Boulders

Stones can now be both pushed AND pulled by holding the use key and pressing left or right. This is largely added to avoid situations where stones are moved into corners and can no longer be used.

There is a heavier, darker variant of stone called boulders that can’t be moved, but can still fall. They exist solely as obstacles.

Fire Traps

Fire traps don’t trigger automatically when they see Gemini anymore. Instead, they can be hit from a jump (or arrows, bombs, etc.) to release a fireball. There is a variant not pictured that also shoots fireballs continuously when activated by a switch.

Sand

There are no more “brick” blocks: sand more or less replaces them. Sand is not longer fragile and doesn’t break on touch anymore, but pressing the use key while next to one destroys it - kind of like Minecraft.

Buttons, Switches

Some buttons are now timed: when stepped off, their effects will persist for a short time. There are audio and visual cues that indicate how much time the effect will last. In the video, a crank is being lifted for a second after the button has been pressed!

There also switches, that are like one-time activated buttons. They are circular and can only be activated when hit by arrows, bombs. etc.

More

There is a rather large core mechanic for Gemini that I’m currently working on and will probably share once completed.

That’s all for now. Happy Holidays!

I made a spinning animation for cranks that looks really cool in action!

Boss sneak peek.

You’ll learn more about her later!

Gemini is all about collecting treasure, so I wanted to make even the most common kinds of item in the game to just feel really satisfying to pick up. Still have room to improve, but tuning game feel is one of the most fun parts of development!

Watch your step

Haven’t had time to work on Gemini consistently since August, but I plowed through a lot of work in the past few days.

After a lot of playtesting, I realized a big problem with Gemini’s game design was how easy it was to get stuck on a level and forced to restart: if you broke an arrow/bomb crate at the wrong time or pushed a block into a corner. A lot of good puzzle games (Limbo, Portal, INSIDE) only restart on death, and gameplay is deliberately designed to avoid “stuck” states.

There are also problems with the existing objects. Too many objects had shared properties. With hazards like arrows and fireballs, the variety became a little too convoluted.

I started pulling out a lot of wires and rewriting things to fix these issues. I won’t talk about it too much until I’ve got it sorted out, but there are fairly significant gameplay changes coming. A lot of the code has also been refactored, and the world feels much more responsive and reactive!

This is probably the last major revision I’m making before I’m forcing myself to commit with the game’s engine and finish the levels + story. I want to deliver this game reasonably quickly.

Design takes a lot of iteration!

Here are many attempts I made trying to design the look of a specific object. I’m trying to convey information about how an object acts through its appearance. Some objects have very strange, specific behaviour, so capturing their nuance in 16x16 pixels is usually pretty tough.

Lots of explosions

Cranks are switch-activated objects that are attached to large weights. There’s a lot they can be used for!