proxxie

Puzzle Mechanic: Blocks

Added 2021-03-16 10:26:00 +0000 UTC

Greetings! As I mentioned last time, I've been working on designing puzzles for Alex's next trip to The Oracle. I want it to involve portals as before, but I wanted to make it a little more interesting the second time around. Since the control scheme would make a "portal gun" kinda clunky, I started thinking about other things I could do to add a new wrinkle to the portal mechanic. I settled on a few ideas, and one of those required a little coding - projectable blocks.

They're blocks, and as you might expect you can push/pull them around. But they're not just regular blocks - you can also project portals onto them! I've included a little video so you can see it in action.

I know it's not groundbreaking stuff, but it should give me a few more tools to design an interesting challenge. It probably looks pretty simple, but it actually took me quite a while to get it working. Part of that was down to some poor choices I made when setting up the portal mechanic originally and part of it was dealing with a few quirks of the engine.

Since I came back to work on portal stuff again, I also took the opportunity to polish the whole portal experience a little (including the first visit to the Oracle.) The PC no longer does that weird, janky movement when pushing statues around, and I changed it so that connected portals are the same color (looking back, I have no idea why I did otherwise.) Oh, and I also added a fade in/fade out to the portals when they disappear or show up in a new spot (this took me a little bit, actually.) The effect is (intentionally) subtle, but I think the effort was worth it. Having them instantly appear/disappear just looked bad.

I meant to post Sunday, but I wanted to complete what I was working on first so I could show you! Next up is actually making the puzzle levels, and I have a few ideas I hope will be fun. Thank you for your support!