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I love this

Melos Victory (Clear time more around 4 hours i think, left it running sometimes)

(spoilers)

my route:  Bad End -> Windless (Devil/Poison Clear) -> Fireless -> Loveless -> True end (Used Angel/hints for some statues). Pig Party, Bone Zone and the Wind Move complexities were highlights. Also liked the art a lot in the heaven area.

Outside of those I really liked how layered/dense this game felt - revisiting each cavern over the multiple runs, finding new nooks that weren't there before. There feels like something resonant between this and the game's narrative elements about the world being composed of someone's fragments: the various parts of the world take on symbolic meaning: the void at the bottom, escaping through heaven on the top, the true lords being locked away in the far, difficult fragments. It was interesting how the level design feels like it progresses through three modes - the false lords/Heart arc feel like a less extreme adventure platformer...but there's a sense of something being held back... which is then unleashed in the three True Lord routes. Then to wrap it up, the game has all sorts of interesting light-hearted tricks and moments you're required to play through through the True Ending run. Something about that felt really in communication with how the narrative elements played out. Very neat!
 

Thank you Sarah!! Looking forward to posting new updates soon. Our writer is posting some things over on twitter recently! https://twitter.com/powder_sandy

nice game! made it to the end to find my advice, haha.

Thanks for the support!!

Props like bushes, trees, boxes, etc, which are added separately, have their own collision behavior.

I forget if I responded! but anything in a chunk gets added into a composite, static mesh collider for that chunk.

thanks for playing! Yeah I'm wondering about the braking after jumping and air stuff. I feel like the 4-direction booster controls are strange enough that  it would be ok to compromise more towards normal platformers by adding some air control/more controllable braking - especially with all of the magic spell stuff i want to add.

thanks for checking it out! Generally for this kind of game the levels would avoid going upwards, north to south. For the depth perception stuff I think there would eventually be a more polished marker that marks more blocks in front of you.

thank you for checking this little game out!

Thanks for playing! Some of the braking stuff was definitely off after looking into it, I tried adjusting stuff so smaller movements are easier to perform consistently. Glad it seems fruitful so far!

Thanks for checking it out! Made some adjustments with the feedback in mind, I think the original version was a bit too in between something that seems like 'you should go fast' and 'you should go slow'. Going slower is what I'm going for so I've tweaked it a bit in that direction.

it is on both!

i found the 13th island - the cat is now rich for life..

thank you for playing and the comment!

try this out! https://itch.io/t/369142/common-windows-mac-os-bugs

If that doesn't work there is a fan remake you can legally use instead: https://pixiecatsupreme.itch.io/anodyne-sharp

amazing! ...any hints for the endings? i died in the ending i found.

Thank you! I wrote a new post in this devlog series. Your thoughts were very helpful! Maybe I have something prototypable now.. https://han-tani.itch.io/shuffled-world-codename/devlog/498463/004-shuffled-worl...

Hi Chris! Thinking back on Anodyne 2/Sephonie/Game 5, I feel like we tend to do this 'dance' between different poles of focus - core gameplay (e.g... platforming in sephonie), 'secondary gameplay' (e.g., level design philosophy, how many levels, vibes, world design in sephonie), and the story. Often getting excited and brainstorming widely on one of these poles will lead to the 'practical concern' of one of the other poles. Depending on the time we might shift focus, or let time pass, and in the process, we'll forget a bit about one of the poles we had worked on. Over time, the more interesting ideas remain while the others tend to drift away.

Eventually though we do have to stop thinking widely and we try to solidify some aspect. So far this has always been the story or the gameplay-core - the systems tend to require a bit more concrete in story or gameplay-core in order to actually become tangible.

I would say that we kind of do this (often we try to brainstorm rough plots and characters when it comes to story) a few times (or maybe just infinitely, but in smaller magnitudes, until the game is done.

Brainstorming the secondary gameplay too much, I think, tends to lead to the most time wasted, but we also get a lot of wild/interesting ideas. It's kind of like the difference between designing "The Jump" of a game vs. "Where The Jump Happens"... any platformer inevitably needs a Jump, but you sort of need to think wildly about 'where the jump happens' to make anything interesting in the end outside of a tech demo. But if you only ever dream about "Where The Jump Happens" then nothing will ever take form.

I think the balance (which is hard to find as every project is different!) is to not get too invested in any one 'secondary gameplay idea'... since world design and like, progression systems or whatever, can change really quickly according to the demands of other things.

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If I had any reflections now, as we're edging more into production of Game 5, I think we tend to waste too much energy with the really really early brainstorming? E.g. Late 2020 and early 2021. That's not to say it's a complete waste, but I do think I, at least, need some period of consistent time where I'm able to make progress on something concrete (a story plot or a gameplay prototype), while also being able to jump around to the wide brainstorming. Rather than focusing on one of these things, forgetting about the project for a month, etc. A lot of the extremely early ideas for Game 5 didn't amount to much, except maybe some thematic concerns, and maybe the visual style being 3D somehow.

I haven't talked about it yet, but we had a weird turn of events with the story in this game. Usually the story undergoes one major revision, after the gameplay has gotten its feet and we can figure things out better - but Game 5 went through one and is going through a relatively minor (though important) one. It's related to the setting which veered into the overly-realistic-historical, before we realized that it was causing issues with how widely we could think about writing and gameplay. So we've steered it back towards the more fantastical while trying to preserve the historical research/themes we're interested in. 

When it comes to that, I guess it's a matter of philosophy... I think that when it comes to games, if a story or writing style is restricting the gameplay (e.g. "Wait, wouldn't this enemy acting like this seem too strange?")  - if the gameplay is 'begging' to go in a direction, but it doesn't 'fit' the setting or something... then something in the story has got to go or change, and that's what we're doing with Game 5.

Hi! The game goes full screen in the sense it will fill the screen (with borders) but the game is fixed at that gameboy-esque aspect ratio.

Thank you for writing! I appreciate you engaging with the design ideas here. I sort of got distracted with other stuff and stuck again, so I haven't thought much about the design of this project (although the story and themes are always on my mind).

I agree with you in that it'd be nice if a significant part of the game is the 'engagement with the world'... I wonder how to balance that. In my experience I've personally had a hard time in balancing games with two big 'systems' (in this case, mapping and exploration). Either one gets cut or they end up existing a bit independently (e.g. Sephonie's Linking/Platforming) But maybe it's a challenge worth approaching.

It's frustrating to not have many game reference points to go on. The closest thing to the 'trial and error' I can think of is Mu Cartographer - really interesting game, basically it's a procedural world you navigate by twisting strange knobs, and you can find treasure in the noise. https://store.steampowered.com/app/513360/Mu_Cartographer/ Of course, that game is pretty different in design goals from what I have in mind, but it feels like somewhat of a proof of concept that 'experimental exploration' could be fruitful.

Real life has a lot of great analogies with the game, now that I think about it - often google maps is just 90% and the rest is having to improvise based on street/outside conditions, street signs. Paths to a place are full of things that you didn't expect, pleasant surprises... hm.

The idea about having 'partial undo' items is really good, it definitely feels important for the exploration to be open to experimentation, rather than punishing for failure. Sort of like how Mu Cartographer lets you know when you're kinda close to a treasure, and you can keep unadjusting/adjusting knobs as needed.

Your comment also gives me an idea about 'solutions' to maps... sort of inspired by 'closeness' in things like recommendation engines, maybe the path to a treasure merely needs to be 'close' to the ideal solution (the analogy would be like, a game that's a 90% "match" to Anodyne 2). I kind of like that, it might even fit with the theming of the story.

I wonder how the exploration (on a granular basis) would stay engaging, but with a game like Yume Nikki in mind, maybe filling rooms with strange sights and characters is enough? I guess this is a case where overthinking things would lead to perfunctory design (e.g. if it was combat-based, and I had to kill enemies with a Red Weapon to get to a Red Room... etc).

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Thanks for writing your thoughts on the themes! While I plan to use the visual language of 'towns', this very much is a story that's thinking more about subcultures and types creative circles. I'm glad to hear that it sounds resonant so far!

Like you bring up with the internet, I guess this game is quite inspired by the experience of living on the internet.. ending up in strange places with surprising ideas, meeting or observing people with totally different interests and priorities is in general an enriching way to live, I feel. Actually, there's an old story/game idea (that's a partial inspiration for Shuffled World) I had that's basically analogizing discord servers and their relative isolation and connection. The way that 'invite codes' are sort of like these special passwords or tunnels to different 'discord worlds', etc.

Anyways, time will tell if I manage to work on any of this stuff but I'm glad that these posts are interesting as-is!

Hi, I think Steam opening is a quirk of Anodyne being old and how it handles Steam - is the game still playable?  Does it still open Steam if steam is closed? If the game works fine I generally don't give out Steam keys.

is there a photo of the error message? There's also a c# version of the game available to play if you'd like (search anodynesharp)

thank you!!

thank you!

Try installing this https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26999

That's interesting to hear! Yeah I like the idea of level ups leading to slightly more build complexity, rather than anything else.

Thanks Bobo the Cat! High praise! Anodyne 2 is a special game, I want to replay it again.

Thank you!!

Oh wow, that's cool to hear! I like how this game's world feels like an interesting collection of platforming challenges/puzzles and how previous level mechanics will come back and be remixed into other ideas.

Maybe one day.... maybe....

5/5

boooobo

we sized the player around 1x1 units, and 14x14 ended up being a decent amount of visual density while also being wide enough to handle kind of the combat the game has!

thanks!

Thank you! Yeah I'm excited by how things will turn out!  I am on mastodon, though not too active right now: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@hantani

Thanks John!!

Thank you! Yes, that would be neat, it's a reason I love 3D.. fun to take the camera wherever.

Thanks!! Yeah, it definitely does feel more along the lines of 3DS/DS - interesting technical restraints that nonetheless have neat ways to approach the art. I'm excited to make more areas with the autocuber tool!

Hey Brett! Nice to see you here, and thanks! I'm very excited about the Ys part :)