Dead prototypes: Piczle Blocks 3D

This one is painful. What is it? A new logic-puzzle type for the Piczle pantheon, Piczle Cross but in 3D! Imagine the classic nonogram puzzle as played in Piczle Cross Adventure but with an added dimension. How far did it get? I spent quite a bit of time on this, probably because I was willing … Continue reading Dead prototypes: Piczle Blocks 3D

Dead prototypes: Brutris

What is it? A 3D variant of Tetris where, once placed, the blocks together created a procedurally generated Brutalist building. How far did it get? Not very. I created the main play field and was about to start looking into dynamically creating Brutalist textures on the Tetris blocks when... Why kill it? ...the design. For … Continue reading Dead prototypes: Brutris

Dead prototypes: Osmosis DX

It is a truism that game developers have a severe case of greener grass syndrome as soon as a project starts requiring serious work. We all have so many ideas and the temptation is always there to start a new project before you've finished - often even before you've properly started - your current one. … Continue reading Dead prototypes: Osmosis DX

Designing shareable moments

One small change Nintendo recently made to their eShop interface highlights one of the growing issues with the platform: a simple indicator of how many games are listed in the "Great Deals" section showed us that this week alone there were over 1000 titles on sale. When Piczle Lines DX was launched there were around … Continue reading Designing shareable moments

In-editor tool design

When using a powerful set of tools like those provided within Unreal Engine 4 it's not a bad idea to keep any bespoke tools you may need to use within the engine as well. The idea being that when you're creating your game and, say, you need to add or adjust a new puzzle, in … Continue reading In-editor tool design

Piczle Cross Adventure post-mortem

After every project is "finished", so far as they ever are, I like to look back on the development process and see what I learned, what mistakes I made and what I did well. Though Piczle Cross Adventure has barely been released I thought I'd do a post-mortem on it already, even though at this … Continue reading Piczle Cross Adventure post-mortem

BluePrints: dynamic button graphics

Future-planning when I make my projects mostly revolves around doing a little work right off the bat to avoid tedious work later on. One example I'll give here is for those little buttons you see in the margins of the game that tell you what buttons do what. You'll have seen them in Piczle games. … Continue reading BluePrints: dynamic button graphics

BluePrints: Steamworks

I shan't delve into the details of Steamworks itself too much. Anybody with a desire to develop and a spare (recoupable) $100 can get access to Steamworks and its API and documentation. In this post specifically I'll write a little about integrating it into UE4 (sort of) and adding Steam achievements to Piczle Cross Adventure. … Continue reading BluePrints: Steamworks

BluePrints: Mouse input overlay

Piczle Cross Adventure was initially mainly designed specifically for the Nintendo Switch. I baked in a few extras to make porting to other consoles potentially a lot easier, and because of the size of the largest puzzles I also made a decision to not use touch input. A big headache in Piczle Colors was developing … Continue reading BluePrints: Mouse input overlay

Blueprints: Quick reflex input

One of the many reasons I decided to include a fishing mini-game, aside from it being required by law in any RPG-like adventure game, was to challenge myself on a few new scripting issues. Both the casting off and the reeling in require the player to press A when a pointer moves over a specific … Continue reading Blueprints: Quick reflex input