First post of 2015! Happy New Year, everyone!
I’ve continued working on the new level. It’s almost ready.
I learned an important lesson about programming these last few days: the most elegant solution isn’t always the best one. I spent two days trying to create a full comprehensive systematic approach for the new mechanic I’m experimenting with, so that it would work with n components in any permutation. It was a pretty large and complex undertaking, and I kept tripping over the logic of everything.
After two days with nothing to show for it, I decided to go for a hack solution instead. For this approach, it only worked for one case. So for example, I would state specifically what the end state had to be, instead of allowing the programming to dictate if the end state was correct.
It took way less time to implement. Within an hour, the mechanic was working in the game. This is particularly important, because at this stage, I’m still prototyping the design of the mechanic. It’s more important that I get it ready enough so that I can put it in front of someone and have them try it out, and see if there are any design issues. The player isn’t going to see the code behind it, so the elegant solution really doesn’t add anything.
It may come in handy later, when it’s needed, but for now, there’s no reason to implement that. The most important thing to optimize for is time. If the mechanic works and I need a comprehensive system, great, I’ll write it. But if the mechanic doesn’t work, then I just saved myself a lot of time.
RELATIVITY has been selected by Rock, Paper, Shotgun as one of the games that could be good in 2015!
I’m incredibly honored to be on this list. I was actually a little bummed at first because I was looking under “puzzle games” and didn’t see RELATIVITY on there, but it turns it was listed under “exploration games”. This is quite interesting, because I think even though the project did start as very puzzle-oriented, I think the focus has indeed shifted more to exploration. Funny that Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a better sense of how to categorize the game than I did.
Oh, and just to clarify, the game did not release yesterday. I don’t know where they got that date from…
Finally, here’s today’s perfect looping gif:
