Available here - There is video too so follow the link for the full post!
This week it's my turn again. I've been working on a lot of exciting new things recently so it's been hard to choose what to talk about! I've settled on talking about the ToolBox or what used to be the gun. So hold onto your internet capable devices.. it's gonna be a bumpy and disjointed ride through our tools history.
So it all started with a gun... or really just a placeholder cube with a slightly smaller cube that fired other even smaller cubes at other cubes. During early iterations of the game we were trying to get just the concept of firing programs at objects and getting them to change on impact so having a gun really did make sense. We even had little guys who followed you around in the creepiest of manners that you could cause to be shot up using the precursor to apply force or blocked using a createobject mixed with a stretchobject. These little enemies again made a gun feel like the right choice and so it was developed through many iterations..... (just a few as an example)
....until finally it came to this. The gun that currently sits in the game.
But as the gun developed so did the game and what once seemed appropriate to be a gun started to feel less and less like the right way to go. So here's a mini breakdown of the pros and cons to having this as our programming tool:
Pro
- Gives the player an obvious on screen tool that they are using to edit geometry.
- It is a nice looking gun...
Con
- Why is it a gun? (Common question from our audience)
- Gun not really used until near the end of the current version of the game?
- Hard to tell what is being used for what.
- Mostly static until you get to encrypters/decrypters.
- Again... gun? No enemies? Is this call of duty? When do I get to shoot stuff? Am i even using the gun now? (usually no.)
Result: While it's nice having something on screen that's obviously aiding the player with the editable geometry there really is no need for it to be a gun especially when it's not being used as a gun for close to three quarters of the game.
So where do you begin when it comes to creating something that needs to work both short and long range that isn't a gun? We had a few people during our expeditions to protoplay and game city suggest maybe something like the antichamber tool which while clearly isn't a gun does function as a ranged dispenser of cubes.
Antichamber
So we scuffled around trying to find a direction to go on that was vaguely gun shaped but not gun shaped with suffice to say is not an easy task. We looked for inspiration from everywhere we could from carpenters and opticians tools to dentistry and sextants. Suffice to say there are some really scary looking tools out there! There were quite a few ideas came up with but nothing was really sticking out as the direction we needed to go in. Everything seemed to be too complex or using shapes that just didn't fit in with our world.
So we tried something else... Perhaps instead of a gun the character could have more of a direct input with something either built in or attached to the hand? Something a little more similar to Q.U.B.E maybe?
Q.U.B.E
Again we tried a few different iterations with this idea but it all seemed far away from what we were needing and considering our characters design is still very much in flux how did we know that there would even be a hand at all?
We took a step back. Thought about what was important to get across with the object and what we would like it to do.
We wanted it to:
Be simple in shape but easily recognisable
Be representative of both types of use, (single block editing and multiple block editing)
Be based more around movement
Have more of a link with the programming canvas
Have the option to transform when it's use changes
This was still a very confusing point to be at. While we'd manage to hone in a bit more on what we were needing we still had little idea of what actually could fit that space. I started looking more to the geometry of the world we'd created and I was reminded of puzzle boxes. Mus brought up the hellraiser cube and how that moves in interesting ways and we started to head in the direction of having a cube as the base for the tool with its interest being brought in through a variety of animations and glitches.
Enter cube designs! Considering the whole idea was to have something that wasn't too detailed to begin with but was made more interesting by movement, static concepting clearly was a little tricky for this. There was plenty of wild hand gestures and odd explanations for how they could move combined with gifs which sort of half represented how it could potentially move...
After explaining a bunch we narrowed it down to two possibilities but in order to choose we needed a better representation for it's idle state, its open state (when the programming canvas was being used) and it's initial glitched state.
Enter door number one and door number two.
From here we chose door number two, it had a lot of potential for glitches and it's idle state was simple enough to compliment the world but could easily be made more complex by being broken down into smaller cubes. Which was particularly useful when it came to think about how it would open up to reveal the programming canvas.
I went on to do some more planning for how it could move and what could be contained within it's core when it opened up. This really needs to be turned into a proper document but with so much going on It felt quicker to do it this way.. I can make a document a little later on.
So here it is, our Toolbox in it's current form [Videos through the link]:
http://www.spacebudgie.com/dev-blog-10-developing-the-toolbox/
This has been a very condensed and slightly jumbled account of how our Toolbox has came to be. Thanks for reading!
-Robin