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Is it an ox pulling a cart? As with my previous guess, the eight pointing down are the four legs and four wheels, the cart is the one dragging behind, the two pointing up are the ears. The two pointing the way to town would be the ox horns.

I'm working on an entry. 

The music from Tunnel Vision is now on SoundCloud, along with the music from my MAGS game Elevation!    Free to listen here:

https://soundcloud.com/user-873606550/albums

Enjoy!

Thrilled to be included in this issue! Thanks for a great write up!

There's another way, too, that I think really good adventure games avoid randomness, which is to start with story and have all of the puzzles be a direct result of story events and character actions.

If solving the puzzle doesn't directly progress the story, then it will feel a lot more random and like the puzzles can be isolated from the rest of the game. But if the puzzles and story are inextricably intertwined, then no matter how different each puzzle is from the last, it will still feel natural and logical.

@eri0o great ideas, thanks! I'll look at wings3d too.

You all are really helpful here. 

Thanks @heltenjon . I was thinking more about this and realized that drawing a few layers parallax style might make this type of turning situation easier as well--seeing it as one larger background instead of multiple screens. That definitely makes it less daunting. 

And @eri0o and @cat , with regard to reusing elements, i also realized that, for example, when going down a hallway, I can draw the "end of the hallway" screen first, and then shrink it to use as part of the "farther away" screen. That would speed things up too. 

Really interesting discussion here, and I appreciate all of the input!   

@cat thanks for the game rec, I will check it out!

@heltenjon I'm trying to picture this and I think I get it--do you mean it creates the illusion of turning while standing still, like looking toward different walls within the same space? That could be useful, thanks.

@morganw that is definitely a different way of thinking about it! I will have to give it some consideration and see what creative options might lie in that direction!

Hi @eri0o , thanks for chiming in. I have thought about trying to do some basic 3D rendering, but the programs I have tried in the past (Blender, Unity's built in modeler) have taken a long time to learn and have very complicated documentation and very time consuming tutorials. Google Sketchup was OK but that seems to be not free or not existing anymore. Are there any other free rendering programs that are maybe simpler in functionality (I don't need to render characters or faces, for example), and which due to being simpler are faster to use? I feel like I read about one recently but have forgotten the name... 

The structure of the game world is similar to MYST in that you begin with a sort of "home base" area (about 6 rooms), and from there travel to 5 other places (each also around 6 rooms, about half of them outdoors). Reusing parts of rooms is possible in some places, but not most. So with a total of around 36 rooms already, drawing a lot of them from differing angles could mean 60 or more screens, plus cutscenes.

I'd really like to bring that number as far down as possible, or at least find ways to DRASTICALLY speed up my workflow with regard to drawing background scenes. Rendering in 3D and then tracing could do this, but only if the rendering program doesn't take forever to learn.

With regard to world/story constraints, I can try to place more limits on some of these rooms (having certain places be "one-way" for example, so you can't turn around), but that won't work in more than a small number of places. Other than that, I'm going to need to either accept that some locations need multiple versions or else find VERY clever ways to limit the need for looking in different directions. It's certainly a complex thing to figure out.

Hey all,

I'm just beginning to develop another first person game, and I have some really big design decisions to make. The main one is how to avoid, wherever possible, having to redraw the same background from multiple angles when the player travels in different directions. The most obvious example would be the same hallway drawn twice, one from each end, but that's not really what I'm concerned about.

To illustrate, here are two screenshots from MYST:




This is the same staircase, seen from the top and from the bottom. I'm wondering if there's a way to compose backgrounds in ways that work in both directions.

What do I mean by that?

Here's another MYST example:



I feel like this image could do "double duty" in that, once you reach the bottom of the stairs, it works both as a "reached the bottom" image and as a "starting from the bottom" image. No need to draw the bottom of the stairs from both a "looking down" and "looking up" perspective.

However, the staircase itself would still need a background image for each direction. That feels unavoidable. But is it?

Another option would appear to be skipping the staircase itself altogether and having no "liminal" or "transitional" spaces like that, which would always need to be drawn from both directions. But that seems like it would make the world a lot smaller and thus greatly reduce immersion.

I could also do a "map" between each location like @lorenzo just did with "A Stranger in Utopia" (good game, you should play it), but I'm going for a more "walking between each place" feel.

Perhaps it's impossible to compromise on this (it may simply be an inherent component of the first-person POV), but I feel like there must be creative ways around it.

For example, with a ladder, facing the ladder itself instead of facing up or down it would save the need for multiple perspectives. It's vertical movement only rather than forward/backward. But that doesn't work with staircases or, e.g., forest paths. I can't make it vertical movement everywhere.

And to be clear, I'm certainly not opposed to drawing *some* backgrounds from multiple perspectives (it seems futile to attempt to avoid this altogether). Rather, I'm trying to find a balance between full immersion and not doubling or tripling the amount of backgrounds I need to draw. If it was all pre-rendered like MYST, this wouldn't be an issue, but alas, I am a drawer and not a modeler.

Any ideas or advice? Any first-person games that handle this well? I'd love to see more examples of well-composed first-person backgrounds that allow for traversal in multiple directions with one image, but it's hard to know where to start looking for that.

This was really compelling, and that final decision was grueling to make! I'm definitely going to play the other way and get the other ending too. 

Do you have objects in the room that are marked as "clickable" in the room editor? If so, the click may be treated as an object click rather than a walk click.

Played both endings. They were very different! And the soundtrack was perfect.

Tried it out in the browser and was impressed with number of possibilities. Faces are very difficult for me to draw, so kudos.

Two problems, unfortunately - running firefox on Windows 10, I got no cursor visible. Could still click the buttons though. Second problem is the "random" button seemed to do nothing.

This looks great! Awesome art style. I love the limited color palette. How were the colors chosen?

This isn't the answer I'm sure since it all feels like a stretch, but: a horse pulling a cart?

Two pointing up = the heads of the horse and the driver. Eight pointing down = the horse's four legs plus the cart's four wheels. Two showing the way to town = two blinders on the horse. One dragging behind = the cart itself?

Looks like @Creamy is our winner! I'm glad I didn't have to cast a tiebreaker vote because it would have been very difficult to pick. Great job, both of you!   

Congratulations @Creamy! It's a fantastic piece. You're up for next month.

@Rik_Vargard thanks so much for playing! Glad you enjoyed it so much.  Every different aspect (art, coding, puzzles, music) was its own extensive project, and there's nothing better than hearing that people liked it! 

Welcome! This forum is a great resource for solving all kinds of issues, and searching the past topics has saved me so much time and so many headaches.    Most of my questions had been answered in past posts because the people here are very helpful.    Good luck with your game!

We need some more votes! Anyone else want to chime in?