I am a personal fan of books in adventure games as a way to offer extra information in a way that is entirely optional to the player. It is a cheap but effective way to populate the world with extra information, back story, whatever you wish. And in this case I also use books to … Continue reading Books
Dialogs
One element of the old-style RPGs we all know and love, and that persist in video games to this day, are the dialog boxes where the text appears letter by letter. Why these exist exactly is not clear. If you think about it they don't make that much sense. But they are part of video … Continue reading Dialogs
World design
When making puzzles for Piczle Lines DX the first step was to think of a category and then to think up 20 items that would fit such a category. This was by far the hardest part of designing Piczle Lines! Try it for yourself. Pick any category and think of 20 items in that category … Continue reading World design
Blueprints: In-game messaging
Aside from character dialogues Piczle Cross Adventure also features some basic in-game messaging. In Piczle Colors some information was broadcast to the player through a fake Twitter-style social media post pop-up. When the player reached a milestone, unlocked a level, earned a trophy or anything like that, one of the game's characters would "tweet" at … Continue reading Blueprints: In-game messaging
Interactive tutorial
If I know something about tutorials it is, frankly, that I dislike them. Quite a bit. As a player having to follow a tutorial, as well as as a developer actually creating a tutorial, both of these are onerous and annoying. However, when dealing with logic-puzzles that often have very specific rules there sadly isn't … Continue reading Interactive tutorial
Blueprints: Score-chan actor
A little technical blog post this week, as I talk through the creation of the Score-chan Actor BluePrint in Unreal Engine 4. Paper2D functionality in UE4 is not officially supported anymore and has a couple of quirks. However the Sprite and Flipbook Actor Blueprint classes are very useful and contain everything you need to quickly … Continue reading Blueprints: Score-chan actor
Piczle Colors post-mortem
Something slightly different for this week's devblog, but that has a bearing on the development of Piczle Cross Adventure nonetheless: I thought I'd look back on the development of Piczle Colors and write down some of the lessons learned and observations made. Piczle Colors is currently available from the Nintendo Switch eShop world-wide and as … Continue reading Piczle Colors post-mortem
