Making TALLNUM (TL) a puzzle about perception and numbers.

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by takemuraori, Jul 31, 2016.

  1. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    Dear everyone, it has been a long time since my last released game, I have been hard at work on korikori (still in progress, still gonna get released when its done), and since end of December last year I have started designing what has now become TLâ„–.

    This is a project made in collaboration with Matthew Ostil who does development while I do design. We have been working on it for 8 months and I want to start telling you story and showing how the game evolved and share how it goes from now till released.

    I will be posting one - few times a week.
     
  2. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    First let me tell you that in December last year, what I had in mind what a romanticized metaphor of two numbers that live on a Fibonacci spiral, once a player makes a move the game would add another number to the screen but also would divide all numbers by half. The goal was to tap one of the two to make it still be round and preferably on sequence. I wanted to experiment around player's perception of how numbers would evolve. It looked like the picture below, and the fact that my description is unclear is no coincidence:
    [​IMG]

    We actually did make a prototype, a couple of them - they were unplayable, it was a very bad idea. However as I was working on it other number related system design concepts came into mind, and what you see on the bottom became the foundation for Tallnum.
    [​IMG]
     
  3. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    By GDC time TALLNUM looked like this and had all main game mechanics, what it didn't have were proper controls, tutorials, visual feedback and it did lack few fundamental logic aspects that are added only now. We did show it at GDC together with KoriKori as part of Singapore Games pavilion (a place that was deeply hidden in business area).
     
  4. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    Dear puzzle lovers, while I will continue the story of design process for TALLNUM, I want to say that we are soon will be doing a closed beta testing on IOS, please express your interest.

    *Speaking of iOS we are making the game with an intention to lunch ios first or same time as Android, and right now IOS provides us with some beautiful bugs that look like this (what is wrong here is the transparency of the pink block and how it overlays the rest):
    [​IMG]
     
  5. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    While we are working on implementing the rewind mechanic, preparing more behind the scenes to be posted this weekend,
    we are also happy to announce the beta testing - iOS and Android users are welcome. If you love puzzles you may fun this fun ;)

    Let me know if anyone wants to participate and we will be very happy to send you a build.
     
  6. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    I want to tell a bit on the game design theory and the inspirations for Tallnum, and those were rooted in the two system design concepts I wanted to experiment with:
    First is about an abstraction that happens on a higher level than controls or game control meaning - the idea of a sandbox possibilities when operating with mediums like alphabet or numeric systems. It is like a world in between the middle illustration and the one on the bottom, middle one depicts a railed approach: within a feedback loop an interface tries to explain to the player / user what has to happen and then feedbacks if the action was aligned with that explanation. Sometimes such approach simply limits the number of possibilities. The illustration on the bottom shows full sandbox approach where the interface allows for execution of any ideas and it is the player who decides if outcome is what he or she wanted. Now to me interesting was to make Tallnum into a puzzle game yet have sandbox hidden in the mechanics and the possibilities of what you can do with the numbers.

    Second conceptual inspiration was about the dimensions and layers of such possibilities and their place in the interface. The game is in 3d for a reason Wink
     
  7. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    Few months ago I had an honor to give a podcast interview at an amazing Checkpoints, I talk about pretty much my whole journey to indie games and ideas used in Tallnum, Shapist and KoriKori:

    http://declandineen.com/checkpoints/6wess9n5pr42l8p94cnn95ddxtswrs

    * more visual styles for Tallnum and design updates are coming soon.
     
  8. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    Remember the rewind mechanic I mentioned few posts back, the one time option to undo your last three moves and save the day :) Well it comes with a slow motion game over state where player has a choice to undo or accept the end :) Here shown with one of the premium skins from our art collaboration. This one is designed together with Kevin Kuenstler

    If you like what you see you can help us by following our page on Facebook! You will also see all the cool updates first hand.

    Stay Tuned. The game is coming out near the end of 2016.
     
  9. fgl_sam

    fgl_sam Well-Known Member

    Jun 7, 2016
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    Engineer
    Norwich, UK
    keep going

    I know you're not getting lots of conversation here, but some of us are watching and enjoying seeing your progress. It's been cool to see it come to life!
     
  10. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    thank you!

    Thank you, your words really mean a lot to us, when you have just two people working on a game for a year, everything feels personal, I guess :)

    Back to updating you guys on our progress: here is basic rewind mechanic:

    [​IMG]
     
  11. TheGreatEscaper

    TheGreatEscaper Well-Known Member

    Oct 10, 2014
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    This looks really intriguing. Shapist was an incredible set of puzzles and I'm really interested in seeing what exactly the mechanics for this game are... (and your comment about it having to be 3d really really intrigues me).

    Is the game level based or endless? It seems to be a kind of endless scoring game, which typically aren't my thing, but when they're enigmatic and multilayered like SPL-T then I still love them. This looks cool from what I can see so far!!!
     
  12. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    #12 takemuraori, Dec 19, 2016
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2016
    @TheGreatEscaper - thank you for support, really appreciate your words and yes TLN is endless, but i think we did achieve a sense of non repetitive - a gameplay that requires strategy changes as you progress within one play time

    Another good thing is we have been posting updates on our facebook but it is time we start updating dev logs as well. We are getting more and more awesome screenshots and gifs to post everywhere, website is coming in few days.
    We mentioned collaborating with 5 unique artists, here is a skin by MUXXI - it is still missing few elements.

    [​IMG]

    Next post I will share my impression of using FB boosted posts for the first time and talk about animating artists skins from just still image.
     
  13. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    Apologies for being under a radar, but I am resuming the communication as we are pretty much a month+ from the release on app store. There will be few updates here on dev log within a week, one will cover our process for artists collaboration and how we got to make skins.

    We also took few extra month to once again improve the UI and controls.

    For example - we always had the indicator for the next tile to fall - a digit on the top of the screen. We thought we need to explain it in a tutorial manner, but we hate tutorials as a tool, so we came up with a UI update that explains the facility by itself.
    here it is:

    [​IMG]
     
  14. kaizenkoh

    kaizenkoh Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    Jun 23, 2015
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    Chief Evangelist
    Singapore
    Ori! Been following you since Kori Kori. Awesome to see your game coming out soon, really like the collabs with the artists... all the best and catch you at events in SG.:D
     
  15. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

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    Here is a story about the art in Tallnum, as I have mentioned before we have collaborated with five incredible artists from all over the world. We are soon showing final skins one by one. Today I want to show you the usual process we undergo.

    First we sent to each artist a game rules description, a short gameplay video and a guide about possible number of shapes and textures for each tile.

    [​IMG]
    Here Kevin Kuenstler experimented with basic shapes and idea first on paper then in Illustrator.


    After a round of comments the shapes and colors were finalized and we started to prepare 3d models.
    First I personally did 3d models and animations of those, later Raheel Zubair helped us optimize and redo them.

    [​IMG]

    Finally the models put into a game. In this particular case it became obvious that we needed a background :) So I wrote back to Kevin and he came up with a lovely mountains scene.

    [​IMG]

    We immediately thought of making the sun go down based on a certain score and the guy to sometimes show up behind the mountains.

     
  16. slewis7

    slewis7 Well-Known Member

    Apr 6, 2011
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    Houston, TX
    This is looking great!
     
  17. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    Thank yoU!!! :)
     
  18. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    Today I want to share two things:

    1 - we will be realizing TALLNUM on iOS on May 10th!!!

    2 - I would like to show a skin that I made for Tallnum called REKKA, this visual style was inspired by the art of Rekka Bell and especially Oquonie

    Here it is, with a demonstration of a complex sacrifice tactics:
    [​IMG]
     
  19. takemuraori

    takemuraori Well-Known Member

    #19 takemuraori, Sep 5, 2017
    Last edited: May 9, 2018

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