Project Contrivance overworld thoughts!

This month, we've been thinking and working on Project Contrivance's structure. We decided to base the game on an overworld that houses all the levels - kind of like in the N64 era.

Level progression would be driven by beating levels and gaining resources for opening up more levels. The overworld would contain puzzles of its own, so you wouldn't have to beat every level to proceed, you could gather the remainder of the resources in the overworld, allowing you to bypass levels you don't like.
Each section of the overworld would end with a boss that goes with, and explains the previous levels' theme. Beating the end boss would open up the next section.

Other things we've thought about were giving players the ability to color their characters by finding special items in the overworld, adding competitive elements to multiplayer, and opening up bonus levels.

This system was inspired by the N64 era games like Super Mario 64. We'll show you more once we've progressed enough with development.

In other news, the Nintendo Switch has arrived, and it appears to be successful. We like the console's idea, and enjoy playing on it, so we've decided to keep the Joy-cons in mind when designing the game. We've even managed to make them work on our PCs so we can test the game with them!

Stay fresh!

Happy New Year!

2016 has been a long and eventful year. We've started a new project (Lemniscate), it got greenlit on Steam, but in the meantime, we ran out of resources... We've learned a lot nonetheless. Even our latest fanart seems to have turned out good - it has been seen by about ten thousand people. Thanks, Yuumei, for sharing it!

Lemniscate is progressing slowly, because it requires more time and money than we currently have. Seems like we always take on bigger projects than we can handle... Anyways, since it's not in a bad shape and the foundations are laid down, as soon as we get enough resources, we'll start making a demo for it and promoting it again.

In the meantime, we're educating ourselves in game design and development with tiny (really tiny this time) side-projects. Our current side/practice project is a small two player co-op puzzle game that was inspired by the Nintendo Switch, basically. We really like local coop games and they are the minority nowadays, and we love Nintendo consoles in general. Hearing the news that Unreal 4 is going to be supported on the Switch, maybe if the project turns out to be anything good, we'll be able to release it. (That goes for all of our projects, by the way)

Thank you for helping us out with kind words, actions, or just by visiting this blog once in a while. It means a lot to know that we're not doing this in vain.

Happy New Year!