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
Category: Game design
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
Blueprints: Get a clue
The nonogram puzzles in Piczle Cross Adventure are merely a string of 1s and 0s. Everything else required is calculated while playing the game. Actually, let me take a step back and correct this lie. The puzzles all live in one big datatable, with the puzzle part itself forming a string of 1s and 0s. … Continue reading Blueprints: Get a clue
Piczle Cross, Puzzle & Watch
As a fan of Easter eggs in games, and being in the privileged position of developing games myself , I once made the inadvisable decision to hide an entire mini-game in one of my games and not tell anyone about it (aside from my publisher, who of course has to sign off on all contents … Continue reading Piczle Cross, Puzzle & Watch
Ramping up
When it comes to designing the Piczle series of games I have in mind some very specific ways I want players to experience the ramping up of difficulty and challenge. For Piczle Lines it was a little more difficult with its many different puzzle packs the player could choose from right from the get go, … Continue reading Ramping up
