Thanks! Yes, I worked really hard to make version 2.0.0 a reality. :-)
I picked a font which supports a very large amount of characters, thus allowing plenty of translations. I personally think the font looks alright. I guess it’s a matter of taste. I also intentionally picked a serif font to add a bit of a "vintage" vibe to the game.
About the controls text: What screen resolution do you use?
Yeah, it would be best if a game provides this mod on its own, unless it already rolls out its own tooltip system for some reason.
But just dropping this mod into a random mod collection is not guaranteed to work because the other mods might not expect such changes. That’s just the nature of modding. I explicitly warned in the description this mod is best suited to be included into game by the way. So I think your complaint about compatibility is a bit unfair. This mod was never meant to be able to be dropped in everywhere. That was never the promise.
Version 1.1.0 provides a few new helper functions to hopefully ease some compatibility pains, but it still requires collaboration of other mods. Again, this is by design.
FYI: I just released version 2.0.0 which is a BIG update compared to 1.4.0 (I don't know which version you played).
The rotating hook now has an overlay and should be more intuitive. Arrows appear on blocks. There still isn't a real story, except now this is a deliberate design decision. Not every game needs a deep story. Let's just say this is "good enough" for me. The whole idea of "pirates + laser puzzles" is obviously very silly to begin with so if you try to take it TOO seriously, it quickly falls apart. :D I'm also afraid that by attempting to write a story, it might just feel too "forced" to the player which is why I ultimately decided against writing a story. OK, I lied: You're a pirate on the search for treasure. That's it. That's the official "story". :P
The extensive help book for the blocks has been moved to another place. I'm not sure if it was a good idea but I will see what other players have to say.
And there are just a ton more changes to the game.
The promo image is absolutely ridiculous. The lever, button and antenna on the block do not exist in the real mod. The remote control has "on" and "off" buttons, but also an "on/off" button (which also looks garbled). The "L" button makes no sense. The random up arrow in the background means nothing.
The UI is confusing. The two modes are called "lever" and "button" which is a bit strange. It is inconsistent in calling the channels either "Left/Right" or "Left Click/Right Click". The word "click" does not work anymore, because people can rebind those keys now
The actual node texture looks bad, it uses the same texture on all sides and also has an art style mismatch (not mesecons yellow, no 16×16 texture). And it also doesn't look like in the promo image, and looks identical in ON and OFF state
The chat command makes no sense and feels bloated
Still uses the name "Minetest" instead of "Luanti"
When you destroy an active receiver node, it is not removed from the receiver list, leading to garbage in the database. If an LVM destroys a receiver node, same problem
Code garbage:
The receiver ID is overly complex. It also needs to store data in a file, which is risky because that can lead to data inconsistencies. It would be much simpler to just use node positions to identify receivers instead
The receiver ID is broken by design. It just generates a random 4-digit number and when it collides, it tries again. This mod will freeze when there are 10000 receivers
Uses minetest.serialize to store positions instead of minetest.pos_to_string
Wrong use of translation placeholders: %s instead of @1, or outright string concatenation
There is code for sneak+rightclick with remote on a receiver, but it never runs
And I could just go on and on and on …
PLEASE just learn real progamming already. Vibe coding is a dead end.
Yeah, I kinda agree, it has become somewhat dated due to the variety of games available now, games that break with many expectations (even the controls). At least the tutorial is not wrong or broken, so I keep it public for now. For MTG and MTG-like games, I think it is still relevant. But yeah, I don’t think this will be my main focus of maintenance. I guess I keep basic life support (=no crashes), but that’s probably it.
I’ve toyed with the thought of maybe making a reboot of this called “Luanti Academy” which acts less of a tutorial and more as a showcase both for players and devs alike. Would be more open about the things it shows, and exposing some of the more obscure things. Some kind of interactive experience. Not sure how it would work in practice.
Useful tool if you need a quick visualization of 2D noise, I think I'll keep it.
Although I believe it could use a few more convenience features, to make it more useful to actually use the noise parameters in stuff like mapgens, or decorations. For 2D noises in mapgens, we frequently check if the noise value is within a particular min/max bounds, so customizing the min/max bounds of the rendered pixel color would be very useful.
The information could use some work as well. To make it more "scientific", it should have a gradient showing the meaning of the pixel values, as well as the axis directions (X, Z). Tooltips would also go a long way.
Very strange this is a game and not a mod. I would like it more as a mod. Anyway, this is an overall thumbs up from me.
Btw, have you heard of Perlin Explorer? It's the same, but in 3D.
In this game, your task is to fly over the world of lakes, grasslands, deserts and mountains to extract resources by placing buildings like collectors (to collect ore and more), power plants (to make your buildings work), towns and markets (to earn $$$) and connect them with rails. You can start anywhere you like on the map, which, as usual for Luanti games, extends very very far away.
You start out small but get to increase your industrial empire one building at a time.
At least in theory. In this current stage I cannot recommend this game as it appears to be in an early alpha stage: incomplete, buggy and unpolished. The rails and trains are confusing, the UI is too much Minetest-Game-like (rather than more fitting to an economy game) and sometimes some buildings appear to just not work, or I don't understand them.
The mechanics of the game are often confusing as it seems there are hidden mechanics at play. The behavior of the trains is a great mystery and you don't know or control when they will pick up or drop items.
There are many ways in which your economy can come to a screeching halt and you have no idea why: Is it because the power plant ran out of coal? Is it because a train got stuck or took the wrong turn? Is it because you forgot to tell the workshop what it should do?
The graphics are also disappointing: It literally uses textures from Development Test, for example.
You ask what I am doing? I'm doing the right thing.
LGBTQ+ youth, just like LGBTQ+ adults still face oppression and difficulties due to bigotry and misunderstanding.
If you are interested in details, here is a report from 2018 about the situation in the United States (spoiler: it's not great): https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018-YouthReport-NoVid.pdf
Granted, this is just one country, but in other countries, the struggles are similar.
Pride flags symbolize minorities and the fight for liberation and acceptance. The real danger to youth is bigotry. And I will stand against bigotry any day of the week. This mod is just a very small symbolic gesture towards the greater movement (of which I'm also a part of). Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember that LGBTQ+ does not just mean sexuality. It may also refer to minority romantic orientations, genders, intersex people, just to name 3 examples.
Yes, the game is now very different from its original game jam release, it's almost a different game now. I plan to officially report all or most old reviews as outdated once version 2.0.0 drops.
You just posted cringe. Pride is awesome and based AS FUCK. Pride is a movement for liberation, it is about queer people being themselves and fighting back against bigotry and bullshit sexual, romantic and gender norms that only NPCs believe in. Pride flags celebrate diversity and liberation, both fundamentally good things. Queer oppression is on the rise again (read the news FFS), so Pride is more relevant than ever. And I choose to be on the side of liberty, not oppression.
There is no “controversy”, just endless whining by bullshitters who all have the SAME debunked talking points. It’s boring and cringe.
Yeah, this incompatibility is to be expected because both mods do something with statbars and don't communicate with each other. HUD Bars is the more general framework because it manages the correct positioning of the bars, provided the mod actually uses the HUD Bars mod. I suppose the stamina mod doesn’t do that and instead just adds the statbar directly.
This is of course valid as long you use the stamina mod in isolation but once things get more complex (more mods want to add statbars), that's when problems begin. This is the main reason why the HUD Bars mod exists.
The stamina mod can fix this problem on its side by optionally depending on the HUD Bars mod, if the maintainer wants to do it. If the maintainer does not want to use HUD Bars (a valid choice), at least the incompatiblity should be made "official" IMO.
It is unfair to put the blame on HUD Bars, however. HUD Bars is the more general framework so it is technically nonsense to alter this mod to "please" a more specialized mod.
Fun fact: I wasn't even involved in this discussion or was even aware that it happened (I’ve stepped down years ago), but I’m OK with the new name.
Fun fact 2: The name “MineClone 2” was only for historical reasons, basically. It was a fork of MineClone, made by davedevils who did very very early (and very basic) work on a simple MC clone. You can still find their commits at the very beginning of the commit history. I admit my initial name choice was not creative at all, but back then when I was still the main developer, I didn’t really care.
Because I have stepped down as the main developer from this project years ago, and I haven’t followed the development closely in the last years, I'm not aware of any debates or discussions on new media stuff, which is why I will NOT edit this package directly, just to make sure no information is missed.
For reference, here is the readme for the old game version 0.66.2 just before I stepped down:
As you can see, the license information on that version was:
GPLv3 or later for code
Mixture of libre licenses for media, but for ContentDB's sake, it could be summarized as CC BY-SA 4.0
Please reply to this thread if you are aware of any relevant additions of media that would affect the license.
And if everything looks OK, please fix the license info of the ContentDB page. Thank you.
The 1st levels are trivial; it’s intentional. I want to be sure the player has understood the game, so they had to be fool-proof. I plan to shake up the level order so the teaching levels aren’t all at once at the start.
You’re not the first one to complain about the spiral level. Maybe I need to make it much shorter or delete it, but then I intergrate the idea somewhere else. This game MUST have at least one level with a laser spiral because otherwise it doesn’t count as a laser game. :D
I'm a bit surprised you like that you can’t save in-level; that could be seen as a missing feature. But yeah, that one wasn’t on my TODO list anyway, most levels are short enough for it to not matter so much.
As for no bugs: I’m also not aware of any bugs, I can’t believe it myself. I started priotizing stability after I left MineClone 2 due to (among other reasons) frustration with the ever-increasing bug counter.
As for dead ends: Most levels should be solvable in all situations, but not always. In Inside the Box (the server), dead ends are forbidden. But in Lazarr!, I’m less strict to allow more puzzles. The existence of bombs implies dead ends anyway, but it creates a new layer of complexity where the player must think before exploding things. I’m still careful to avoid all annoying level fails, like when you fall into a hole you can’t get out of, etc. (please report any unfair dead ends as bug, thank you)
Lazarr! won’t have graphics like The Talos Principle, I’m simply not good enough for that yet, plus, the Luanti engine makes it hard anyway. But even if I’d switch engines, the blocky design would stay, as the whole game was designed around it, it is 100% intended. But Luanti’s recent releases offer more and more fancy shaders and light effects but must be enabled first, like volumetric lighting (which Lazarr! allows). I assume future Luanti releases will improve shaders and lighting more.
Thank you for the kind words. There is no sprint feature in the game, nor do I plan one. But I do plan some upgrade/equipment system that upgrades your passive capabilities, and walking faster is one of them.
I don't understand your problem with mob hitboxes. I just reviewed them all again, and they seem OK, except for maybe the mese monster, which has a larger hitbox. (I should probably remove the mese monster anyway.) But no hitboxes are too small for missing the mob IMO. Do you have a specific mob in mind?
The mobs are probably going to change in a future release anyway.
Thanks! Yes, this game aims to have easy, medium and very hard puzzles. I'm also looking forward for the big 2.0.0 release. ;-)
But building good levels is hard …
Thanks. I look if I can consider your review for the big update, for version 2.0.0.
Yeah, probably the help manual shouldn’t give the whole game away from the start. At least I moved these books to the lower floor. I think about progressive unlocking of pages, but I’m not sure about that. Because this game is not truly about keeping its mechanics a secret but about learning how to use it all together to solve puzzles. In the levels you rarely need to search for hidden clue. Basically, you start with all (or most) the information and need to work from there. That’s the current game philosophy. On the other hand, progressive unlocking of pages can help to not overwhelm the player with info initially. Hmmmm …
I'm surprised to learn the hook still causes problems. Maybe I just didn’t explain it well? In the latest beta version, the game now comes with a tutorial level that should explain it. An overlay would be nice indeed, I look into if this can be added.
The hook currently works like this: If you rightclick, you rotate the face clockwise. This should be already intuitive, I hope. The tricky part is the push: If you push (=punch), the block rotates towards the closest of the 4 edges of the face you clicked on. Think of the face being subdivided into 4 (virtual) triangles that meet in the center. Each triangle rotates it towards the edge where its hypotenuse is.
(Note the old reviews from 2021 don’t have anything to do with the current hook. It was a screwdriver back then and it worked completely different and it was very very bad.)
The game currently doesn’t have any lore. Just an excuse plot ("You're a pirate in search of treasure"). I have considered adding at least a minimal plot to glue the game more together. But I’ll think of this much later. I only plan a very minimal plot AT MOST, this game has become is quite complex already. High-quality levels are much more important for now. :D
I totally understand the style is not everyone’s cup of tea and I already suspected some people wouldn’t like the theme to begin with. But if the game made people feel uneasy, that’s kind of the point. If every game was 100% “friendly”, things would get boring. :P
The reason for this very dark theme is pretty much random. It started with the word "Eyeballs" and it all more or less developed to some weird surreal otherworld where it starts at a cult. In fact, I actually planned for it being more “gore”-like, where you would spawn inside a giant freakish creature but it was just too difficult to create the textures for that.
I’m probably going over all my thought process in detail in a post-mortem later. There’s so many things I still want to say.
What I’m not going to do is a “friendly” version because then the whole idea kind of falls apart and I don’t want that. But people can always make texture packs if they want them.
I openly admit the level with the suspended balls was pretty mean. At least I left two important hints and it turned out many people still solved it.
I technically classified it as "gore" because in level 3 there are two small streams of blood. I actually meant to make this game much more "gore-y" where you would spawn inside some arcane creature but it was too hard to create textures so I instead just went with the stone.
Yeah, the timer is intentionally short (1 second) because if I make it longer, the player could easily circumvent many of the level's puzzles because you're too safe when unseen.
My idea is to add new HUD indicators to show how close you're from being "unseen" or something.
It's true. In this year I indeed tried to "play it safe" and not attempt anything too daring, just come up with a simple concept and execute it as well as I could. I wonder if the level reset was too punishing. Maybe I should have set checkpoints or something?
Thank you! Thanks for including your game time. In my tests I took like 15 minutes for a full playthrough but obviously that was because I already knew the solution. xD
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that walking into darkness is a bad idea. The eyes can't see you when it's too dark, that's why.
For a future update (if I do it), I thought of improving the HUD display to show "how well" the eyes can see you so you know better when you're close to be out of sight. Also a "light crystal" to show how dark the spot you're in.
Good suggestion. I’ve implemented it today and this feature will appear in version 2.1.0.
(EDIT: 2.1.0 released. Music volume can be changed now.)
Thanks! Yes, I worked really hard to make version 2.0.0 a reality. :-)
I picked a font which supports a very large amount of characters, thus allowing plenty of translations. I personally think the font looks alright. I guess it’s a matter of taste. I also intentionally picked a serif font to add a bit of a "vintage" vibe to the game.
About the controls text: What screen resolution do you use?
Yes, it’s true: The textures indeed go well together with the islands mod by Termos. Great to be integrated in a game.
Yeah, it would be best if a game provides this mod on its own, unless it already rolls out its own tooltip system for some reason.
But just dropping this mod into a random mod collection is not guaranteed to work because the other mods might not expect such changes. That’s just the nature of modding. I explicitly warned in the description this mod is best suited to be included into game by the way. So I think your complaint about compatibility is a bit unfair. This mod was never meant to be able to be dropped in everywhere. That was never the promise.
Version 1.1.0 provides a few new helper functions to hopefully ease some compatibility pains, but it still requires collaboration of other mods. Again, this is by design.
FYI: I just released version 2.0.0 which is a BIG update compared to 1.4.0 (I don't know which version you played).
The rotating hook now has an overlay and should be more intuitive. Arrows appear on blocks. There still isn't a real story, except now this is a deliberate design decision. Not every game needs a deep story. Let's just say this is "good enough" for me. The whole idea of "pirates + laser puzzles" is obviously very silly to begin with so if you try to take it TOO seriously, it quickly falls apart. :D I'm also afraid that by attempting to write a story, it might just feel too "forced" to the player which is why I ultimately decided against writing a story. OK, I lied: You're a pirate on the search for treasure. That's it. That's the official "story". :P
The extensive help book for the blocks has been moved to another place. I'm not sure if it was a good idea but I will see what other players have to say.
And there are just a ton more changes to the game.
The TNT behavior is actually a bug, not an easter egg. Will be fixed in the next release.
minetest.serializeto store positions instead ofminetest.pos_to_string%sinstead of@1, or outright string concatenationAnd I could just go on and on and on …
PLEASE just learn real progamming already. Vibe coding is a dead end.
I’m happy this game still finds happy players even all those years. :-)
Yeah, I kinda agree, it has become somewhat dated due to the variety of games available now, games that break with many expectations (even the controls). At least the tutorial is not wrong or broken, so I keep it public for now. For MTG and MTG-like games, I think it is still relevant. But yeah, I don’t think this will be my main focus of maintenance. I guess I keep basic life support (=no crashes), but that’s probably it.
I’ve toyed with the thought of maybe making a reboot of this called “Luanti Academy” which acts less of a tutorial and more as a showcase both for players and devs alike. Would be more open about the things it shows, and exposing some of the more obscure things. Some kind of interactive experience. Not sure how it would work in practice.
Useful tool if you need a quick visualization of 2D noise, I think I'll keep it.
Although I believe it could use a few more convenience features, to make it more useful to actually use the noise parameters in stuff like mapgens, or decorations. For 2D noises in mapgens, we frequently check if the noise value is within a particular min/max bounds, so customizing the min/max bounds of the rendered pixel color would be very useful.
The information could use some work as well. To make it more "scientific", it should have a gradient showing the meaning of the pixel values, as well as the axis directions (X, Z). Tooltips would also go a long way.
Very strange this is a game and not a mod. I would like it more as a mod. Anyway, this is an overall thumbs up from me.
Btw, have you heard of Perlin Explorer? It's the same, but in 3D.
(This review is for version 6-7-2023)
In this game, your task is to fly over the world of lakes, grasslands, deserts and mountains to extract resources by placing buildings like collectors (to collect ore and more), power plants (to make your buildings work), towns and markets (to earn $$$) and connect them with rails. You can start anywhere you like on the map, which, as usual for Luanti games, extends very very far away.
You start out small but get to increase your industrial empire one building at a time.
At least in theory. In this current stage I cannot recommend this game as it appears to be in an early alpha stage: incomplete, buggy and unpolished. The rails and trains are confusing, the UI is too much Minetest-Game-like (rather than more fitting to an economy game) and sometimes some buildings appear to just not work, or I don't understand them.
The mechanics of the game are often confusing as it seems there are hidden mechanics at play. The behavior of the trains is a great mystery and you don't know or control when they will pick up or drop items.
There are many ways in which your economy can come to a screeching halt and you have no idea why: Is it because the power plant ran out of coal? Is it because a train got stuck or took the wrong turn? Is it because you forgot to tell the workshop what it should do?
The graphics are also disappointing: It literally uses textures from Development Test, for example.
Well, ContentDB suggests to flag outdated reviews at the top of each review. *shrug*
Yes, I gave up on maintaining it. It's MTG-related, so not exactly my priority.
You ask what I am doing? I'm doing the right thing.
LGBTQ+ youth, just like LGBTQ+ adults still face oppression and difficulties due to bigotry and misunderstanding. If you are interested in details, here is a report from 2018 about the situation in the United States (spoiler: it's not great): https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018-YouthReport-NoVid.pdf Granted, this is just one country, but in other countries, the struggles are similar.
Pride flags symbolize minorities and the fight for liberation and acceptance. The real danger to youth is bigotry. And I will stand against bigotry any day of the week. This mod is just a very small symbolic gesture towards the greater movement (of which I'm also a part of). Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember that LGBTQ+ does not just mean sexuality. It may also refer to minority romantic orientations, genders, intersex people, just to name 3 examples.
Yes, the game is now very different from its original game jam release, it's almost a different game now. I plan to officially report all or most old reviews as outdated once version 2.0.0 drops.
You just posted cringe. Pride is awesome and based AS FUCK. Pride is a movement for liberation, it is about queer people being themselves and fighting back against bigotry and bullshit sexual, romantic and gender norms that only NPCs believe in. Pride flags celebrate diversity and liberation, both fundamentally good things. Queer oppression is on the rise again (read the news FFS), so Pride is more relevant than ever. And I choose to be on the side of liberty, not oppression.
There is no “controversy”, just endless whining by bullshitters who all have the SAME debunked talking points. It’s boring and cringe.
Yeah, this incompatibility is to be expected because both mods do something with statbars and don't communicate with each other. HUD Bars is the more general framework because it manages the correct positioning of the bars, provided the mod actually uses the HUD Bars mod. I suppose the stamina mod doesn’t do that and instead just adds the statbar directly.
This is of course valid as long you use the stamina mod in isolation but once things get more complex (more mods want to add statbars), that's when problems begin. This is the main reason why the HUD Bars mod exists.
The stamina mod can fix this problem on its side by optionally depending on the HUD Bars mod, if the maintainer wants to do it. If the maintainer does not want to use HUD Bars (a valid choice), at least the incompatiblity should be made "official" IMO.
It is unfair to put the blame on HUD Bars, however. HUD Bars is the more general framework so it is technically nonsense to alter this mod to "please" a more specialized mod.
Fun fact: I wasn't even involved in this discussion or was even aware that it happened (I’ve stepped down years ago), but I’m OK with the new name.
Fun fact 2: The name “MineClone 2” was only for historical reasons, basically. It was a fork of MineClone, made by davedevils who did very very early (and very basic) work on a simple MC clone. You can still find their commits at the very beginning of the commit history. I admit my initial name choice was not creative at all, but back then when I was still the main developer, I didn’t really care.
The ContentDB claims the game license is GPLv3 only, but in reality is is GPLv3 "or later". The "or later" is important.
Moreover, this game has a media license that differs from the GPL. It's a mixture of licenses, but overall could be indicated as CC BY-SA 4.0.
https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/src/branch/master/LEGAL.md
Because I have stepped down as the main developer from this project years ago, and I haven’t followed the development closely in the last years, I'm not aware of any debates or discussions on new media stuff, which is why I will NOT edit this package directly, just to make sure no information is missed.
For reference, here is the readme for the old game version 0.66.2 just before I stepped down:
https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/src/tag/0.66.2
As you can see, the license information on that version was:
Please reply to this thread if you are aware of any relevant additions of media that would affect the license. And if everything looks OK, please fix the license info of the ContentDB page. Thank you.
The 1st levels are trivial; it’s intentional. I want to be sure the player has understood the game, so they had to be fool-proof. I plan to shake up the level order so the teaching levels aren’t all at once at the start.
You’re not the first one to complain about the spiral level. Maybe I need to make it much shorter or delete it, but then I intergrate the idea somewhere else. This game MUST have at least one level with a laser spiral because otherwise it doesn’t count as a laser game. :D
I'm a bit surprised you like that you can’t save in-level; that could be seen as a missing feature. But yeah, that one wasn’t on my TODO list anyway, most levels are short enough for it to not matter so much.
As for no bugs: I’m also not aware of any bugs, I can’t believe it myself. I started priotizing stability after I left MineClone 2 due to (among other reasons) frustration with the ever-increasing bug counter.
As for dead ends: Most levels should be solvable in all situations, but not always. In Inside the Box (the server), dead ends are forbidden. But in Lazarr!, I’m less strict to allow more puzzles. The existence of bombs implies dead ends anyway, but it creates a new layer of complexity where the player must think before exploding things. I’m still careful to avoid all annoying level fails, like when you fall into a hole you can’t get out of, etc. (please report any unfair dead ends as bug, thank you)
Lazarr! won’t have graphics like The Talos Principle, I’m simply not good enough for that yet, plus, the Luanti engine makes it hard anyway. But even if I’d switch engines, the blocky design would stay, as the whole game was designed around it, it is 100% intended. But Luanti’s recent releases offer more and more fancy shaders and light effects but must be enabled first, like volumetric lighting (which Lazarr! allows). I assume future Luanti releases will improve shaders and lighting more.
Thank you for the kind words. There is no sprint feature in the game, nor do I plan one. But I do plan some upgrade/equipment system that upgrades your passive capabilities, and walking faster is one of them.
I don't understand your problem with mob hitboxes. I just reviewed them all again, and they seem OK, except for maybe the mese monster, which has a larger hitbox. (I should probably remove the mese monster anyway.) But no hitboxes are too small for missing the mob IMO. Do you have a specific mob in mind? The mobs are probably going to change in a future release anyway.
Thank you for the kind words. I use that tool myself frequently as well, by the way.
Thanks! Yes, this game aims to have easy, medium and very hard puzzles. I'm also looking forward for the big 2.0.0 release. ;-) But building good levels is hard …
With the setting being added, this review no longer applies. I have converted this into a thread.
converted review into a thread
Thanks. I look if I can consider your review for the big update, for version 2.0.0.
Yeah, probably the help manual shouldn’t give the whole game away from the start. At least I moved these books to the lower floor. I think about progressive unlocking of pages, but I’m not sure about that. Because this game is not truly about keeping its mechanics a secret but about learning how to use it all together to solve puzzles. In the levels you rarely need to search for hidden clue. Basically, you start with all (or most) the information and need to work from there. That’s the current game philosophy. On the other hand, progressive unlocking of pages can help to not overwhelm the player with info initially. Hmmmm …
I'm surprised to learn the hook still causes problems. Maybe I just didn’t explain it well? In the latest beta version, the game now comes with a tutorial level that should explain it. An overlay would be nice indeed, I look into if this can be added. The hook currently works like this: If you rightclick, you rotate the face clockwise. This should be already intuitive, I hope. The tricky part is the push: If you push (=punch), the block rotates towards the closest of the 4 edges of the face you clicked on. Think of the face being subdivided into 4 (virtual) triangles that meet in the center. Each triangle rotates it towards the edge where its hypotenuse is.
(Note the old reviews from 2021 don’t have anything to do with the current hook. It was a screwdriver back then and it worked completely different and it was very very bad.)
The game currently doesn’t have any lore. Just an excuse plot ("You're a pirate in search of treasure"). I have considered adding at least a minimal plot to glue the game more together. But I’ll think of this much later. I only plan a very minimal plot AT MOST, this game has become is quite complex already. High-quality levels are much more important for now. :D
There is just something magical about this particular style of music. This music is nice to listen to even if you're not playing.
The non-rotating eyes are intentional. And a bit of Trial and error is part of this game.
But I agree it would have been better if they looked different. I’ve added “make non-rotating eyeballs look different” on the TODO list.
OOOOhhh. The game was just incomplete. Okay, I’ll see how future versions turn out.
Sorry, I can't see the white dot. But I tried something …
Can you please take a look here?: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Eyeballs/issues/17
Thank you! I’m glad to hear I apparently have a “style” now. :-)
Well, you can’t claim you weren’t warned. ;-)
I totally understand the style is not everyone’s cup of tea and I already suspected some people wouldn’t like the theme to begin with. But if the game made people feel uneasy, that’s kind of the point. If every game was 100% “friendly”, things would get boring. :P
The reason for this very dark theme is pretty much random. It started with the word "Eyeballs" and it all more or less developed to some weird surreal otherworld where it starts at a cult. In fact, I actually planned for it being more “gore”-like, where you would spawn inside a giant freakish creature but it was just too difficult to create the textures for that.
I’m probably going over all my thought process in detail in a post-mortem later. There’s so many things I still want to say.
What I’m not going to do is a “friendly” version because then the whole idea kind of falls apart and I don’t want that. But people can always make texture packs if they want them.
I openly admit the level with the suspended balls was pretty mean. At least I left two important hints and it turned out many people still solved it.
Eye like this review. Thank you! :-)
I technically classified it as "gore" because in level 3 there are two small streams of blood. I actually meant to make this game much more "gore-y" where you would spawn inside some arcane creature but it was too hard to create textures so I instead just went with the stone.
Yeah, the timer is intentionally short (1 second) because if I make it longer, the player could easily circumvent many of the level's puzzles because you're too safe when unseen.
My idea is to add new HUD indicators to show how close you're from being "unseen" or something.
That bug never occured to me, no idea what caused it. :-( I want to fix it when the reason is found out.
It's true. In this year I indeed tried to "play it safe" and not attempt anything too daring, just come up with a simple concept and execute it as well as I could. I wonder if the level reset was too punishing. Maybe I should have set checkpoints or something?
Thank you! Thanks for including your game time. In my tests I took like 15 minutes for a full playthrough but obviously that was because I already knew the solution. xD
Haha, I knew the hanging balls level was hard. There's a reason I left the hints. ;-)
May I ask you what the "visual bugs" and the "soft lock" were because bugs should be fixed.
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that walking into darkness is a bad idea. The eyes can't see you when it's too dark, that's why.
For a future update (if I do it), I thought of improving the HUD display to show "how well" the eyes can see you so you know better when you're close to be out of sight. Also a "light crystal" to show how dark the spot you're in.