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Hi guys! long time no update 
Lots of personal stuff got in the way, including my grandfather's passing.
I've been thinking a lot about this game and was just about to give up on it, due to not finding clarity about its purpose and gameplay. Today I launched it again and had some fun tweaking stuff, got some motivation to work a little and ended up spending my entire day doing improvements.
So I won't drop it, but I decided to cut the features and release a simpler version of this toy/simulation for free... when it's ready
Today I tweaked a lot of the simulation stuff, to slowly introduce life forms. Right now only microscopic life exists, which is introduced in the 2nd era and will allow grass and marshes to appear.
I also decided to disable many of the different play modes I tried, because I didn't find any purpose for them. So right now the game map expands without limits, but the player has to place new blocks in the edges of existing tiles (no free place).
Hopefully I'll find someone who likes the idea and volunteers to help making some decent tiles
Back from a 1+week of no work due to work and life stuff...
Anyway, I'll post soon some new gifs of small changes I did, that allow for more varied play modes. I'm doing this to keep possibilities as open as possible, since I'm not totally clear where to go with the game 
Not much done with the simulation part, except improvements to the fire spread which is now more realistic and not totally devastating
In the meantime, I also spent a few minutes to improve the UI a bit, because I was getting tired of transparent rectangles :D
here's a screenshot of how it looks now
Hello folks!
Today's update includes many new shiny things (well, almost).
Camera
Now the game has a camera, which moves around with the player, so the map can be bigger than the screen.
Volcanoes
Volcanoes are a thing! They erupt, burning or creating new tiles around them. They will be more likely to appear at the initial stage of the game, during terraforming. But they also last an unexpected span of time... so you never know when one might erupt again When a volcano becomes extinct, a mountain takes its place. GIF below (sorry, there is no visual feedback on when the volcanoes erupt, you just see the surrounding tiles changing)
Wasteland
A new tile type, which is basically a burnt grassland/forest. Results from volcanoes and wildfires (see below)
Wildfires
This will be one of the "disasters" that will appear in the game. Not sure if the player will "place it" at will, or if it appears by its own.
Fires spread according to tile types. GIF below
Eras
Right now the game has 4 main eras (stages). Each era has a different speed for the simulation, and different tile types become available of disappear.
In the first era (terragen), the player can only place water, desert/bare, volcanoes and mountains. In the 2nd era, life is introduced (not sure how), so grass/forests and everything else will appear.
More to come sooooon
made some minor UI improvements, and also coded a few options to allow for (possible) future gameplay modes.
first, the player "square" color changes to highlight if it is or not possible to act on the current tile
secondly, a mode where the playable map "grows" as you place blocks, and can never place any block unless its edging an already existent one
I figured out that my previous approach to make a nice simulation was taking too much time and getting me in a big risk of boring me out of this game 
So for now I'm making it simpler just to get things moving, and then I'll come back to it later to add more complexity and realism.
I expanded the cell types to 7, now including desert, marsh and swamp.
I've also redone the sprites for each cell type and converted the map to an isometric style, looking much better
Tomorrow I'll begin the simulation itself, so the game will actually start to come to life
While my mind races with ideas on how to expand and make this a complex-and-interesting-enough simulation, I'm for now trying to come up with a "minimum viable product" and then iterate from there.
I'm basically trying to decide on the cell "types", and how the interaction is done during the simulation. For a start, I'm considering a basic set of : plains, water, mountains and forest.
Unlike Conway's game of life, the simulation wont happen per "cycle", but will be more realtime. I don't want tiles to change suddenly, but to allow the effect of neighboring tiles to affect them gradually. When a certain threshold is met, then the tile changes.
The question now is how to make each tile affect tiles around it, and what are the conditions and triggers to begin affecting tiles.
I've been thinking in a way of how certain tiles help others to thrive (in terms of life), damage it, or are neutral.
For instance, a water tile is beneficial to a forest tile. But perhaps if there is too much water surrounding just one forest tile, it might turn it into something else, like a swamp (forest+water). In this case, it gets really complex, because I need to consider how each tile might affect other tiles individually, not just in terms of being positive or negative.
One way to do this was to give each tile a certain quantity of each of the natural elements, and hardcode how much each type has of each natural element. Let's say: forest has "10% water", "20% earth", "70% wood", while a water tile has "100% water". So the water tile next to a forest tile, would GIVE Water*100*Z(some variable here), and receive Earth*0.2*Y + Wood*0.7*Y
In the meantime, I decided to change the gridmap a bit, and is now a bit more "hex-like", each tile has 6 neighbors instead of 8
Hi all!
Frustrated with my latest developments, I decided to work on a small scale game, which I plan to finish in just 1 or 2 months.
Introducing: Blocks of Life
(I'm going all-in the "great artists steal" thing :P)
It's a game-of-life simulation, but using lots of different cell-types, which interact differently with one another. I'm using natural elements, biomes, etc for cell types (for now: water, plain, forest, mountain). Eventually add complex things, like human villages (or cities, as the game-time progresses), maybe animals.
So where does Tetris come in?
You receive "blocks"(cells), just like in Tetris, and you can place only the head of the stack, after which the next one will be available.
So not only you have to manage the simulation going on (and try to make it Thrive!), but also paying attention on how to use the blocks you have available.
The game map is limited when you start, and will slowly increase to allow you to expand (think mini-metro)
Here's my first screenshot :D
Hi everyone!
Plenty of improvements done this week. I sent a playable demo to a few beta testers and got very valuable feedback. Completely revamped the controls of the player and the camera. Everything is much smoother and easier now :)
The main menu also got some improvements and feels better now :)
In the meantime, I've been taking a few more screenshots here and there that show some new levels.
Also trying to improve the water look
On the Steam side of things, the
greenlight campaign is really slow. Been trying my best to get the word out, but these kind of niche-oriented games are really hard to be noticed by big sites. And even the medium ones dont make much difference in bringing people to the page and vote.
Anyway, still have hope that it can be approved before the launch date as I would love to integrate achievements and other Steamworks features in it. Lets see :)
take care
One week passed so here's another compact summarized devlog for A Game of Changes :)
Objects that stand in the way between the camera and the player are now made slightly transparent, so you can always see where you are going :)
A new tile effect has been added to aid in the mechanics and create interesting puzzles. You can only step on this tiles once, after they they disappear (need to work on the "disappear" effect, I know). This effect can be applied to any tile, even if it has other functions too.
Yesterday I had to really push my brains to work out a nice flow for the game levels. Its not easy adapt the I Ching to a game because the player could get stuck very easily. I had to use a huge paper to draw the level's connections and understand where problem might occur
With that solved, I added to the game another important aspect of the I Ching: changing lines. With that, I introduced the first pickable object, after which you can toggle to change lines in the final hexagram. Demo video:
Next week I hope to show you some better animations as I expect to have the character walking animation ready :)
Don't forget there's a google form to subscribe to the game's launch notifications. See you next week or, for daily news, get your info via twitter or the devlog at tigsource.
Another week passed so here's another A Game of Changes summarized devlog!
Life got in the way a lot during this week so I couldn't move forward so much as I wanted to, but still many new things got done.
New mechanics got introduced, which will make puzzles more interesting and challenging. The first one is the "flip" tile, which will swap elements to their opposites:
A new kind of tile is also available which features a "tunnel" below the surface (sorry for the crappy gif quality)
And lastly a rock(fixed) tile, which will never move from its position
Rock tiles are also not affected by the "flip", so this will allow some interesting puzzle mechanics.
Nothing of this is final for now, I'm still testing and working out what works best and provides a good playing experience.
On a more funny and less important side, snow footsteps :D
And finally, I started working on the first draft for a tile texture.
Not sure if I will use textures or not. The whole art of the game is still not clearly defined, and ideally I will be able to get the help of an artist to work on it. Which brings me to my last point....
Funding. I'm finalizing a few major things and solving major bugs to then produce a private demo to send to a few places. With a relatively small funding I could really boost this game's quality by bringing other people's expertise and also have a little more slack in development time to polish it. I'm going to explore a few options and let's see what happens. Suggestions welcomed :)
I've also set up a short google form for people to subscribe to the game's launch notifications. So, if you are interested in it, leave your email and I'll get in touch with you. I'll probably also email a few people to ask for beta testers (and give them a final copy for free ;))
See you next week or, for daily news, get your info via twitter or the devlog at tigsource.
These past days I've been introducing a few more mechanics to make the puzzles more interesting and challenging.
Below is the "flip" tile, which makes the elements swap with their opposites. Still thinking about this though, instead of flopping having them rotate between themselves would also be interesting...
A lot of the core mechanics are done, just a few remain to do.. but I still have to decide about them before coding.
Here's a short gif about... decisions :) (last part had to be cut due to GIF limitations)
Godot is really nice to work with, the way the scene tree works allows for some really quick level building and easy changes to the whole game.
Chance and destiny find themselves interlaced in A Game of Changes.
Journey through the 64 unique puzzle levels that draw inspiration and teachings from one of the oldest classic books in human history, the I Ching (Book of Changes) whose unique wisdom originates from philosophical and scientific observations of the laws which rule existence.
It invites us to conscientiously look within, at one's own personality, character, perspective and purpose while inspiring us to discover the one unspoken, unmanifest, unchanging truth.
Release Date: Q2 2016
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux (possibility of an Android release at a later stage)
Official game page: http://www.bitoutsidethebox.com/a-game-of-changes/
Hi everyone!
I'll be posting while I develop this game, although many parts will have to be kept away from public so as not to spoil the puzzles and some secrets of the game :)
I'm developing the game using the Godot engine in Linux, with a bunch of other free software tools like Blender, Inkscape, Audacity, and the like.
Stay tuned for more devlog action :)
I'm still prototyping this, and coming up with the complex mechanics that will be making the levels of this game. Super excited for it as I'm working on bringing to the game some really cool stuff (non-game related)
too early to speak about this, but I'll be posting a few things once in a while to keep a devlog for historical purposes