After a long and patient labour, Delugional is released today for Android! You can download it right now from the Google Play Store.
If you like solving puzzles, or you like waterfalls, or if you like killing a few minutes on your phone from time to time, I invite you to try it out.
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make this game a reality: Monserratt, for the lovingly hand-painted graphics; Yasamine, for the beautiful music and sound effects; and Rami, for his enthusiastic evangelism for the game. I’m indebted also to all the people who provided feedback at every stage of development, and particularly to the intrepid beta testers, particularly Chris, Myriam and Mark.
When time permits (and another recent release is demanding much attention), I’ll post more about the development process. Until then, try Delugional!
Delugional for Android, a handcrafted puzzle adventure, is now in beta! This means we’re looking for testers.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
To get in on the beta action, send an email to dissolutegames@gmail.com with ‘Delugional beta’ in the title. We’ll send you a link to download the beta version of the game, as well as information on how to provide feedback and bug reports. If the email associated with your Google Play Store account is different from the one you use to contact us, make sure you send us your Play Store account email. (You can check by opening up the Play Store, opening the left-side menu, and checking the email in the upper left corner.)
Beta testers will get early access to the game, a mention in the credits, and our eternal gratitude. The first 50 beta testers will also receive a free promo code for the first premium puzzle pack in the game.
Hello! Long time no blog. I’m still working on Delugional, my puzzle game. As it’s (hopefully) nearing release, I want to talk more about the creative and development process.
I apparently promised, many moons ago, to talk about prototyping. Prototyping is a crucial part of game design.
Here’s the thing. You’re trying to do something new in your game, whether it’s a new mechanic you invent, or a novel combination of existing elements. That’s important – ultimately your game’s identity is whatever you put in it that’s new.
But your cool new idea might not work. Plenty of ideas that’re promising on paper just don’t turn out to be fun in practice. The history of innovation in games is littered with noble failures.
That’s where the prototype comes in. The aim is to take your risky, novel idea, and construct the simplest, quickest test that answers the question: is this fun?
I made a couple of initial prototypes for Delugional – at the time only knowing I wanted to make a puzzle game of some sort. The purpose was to find a fun ‘core mechanic’ with enough depth to build a whole game around.
I thought it could be interesting to make a game inspired by physics simulations. The first prototype took this inspiration very literally – it was a ‘simulation’ of particles that could collide with each other, and off the walls, the idea being that you ‘won’ by finding the right initial configuration for the particles to end up in their proper places.
Here’s a picture.
The red dots are ‘atoms,’ the arrows and numbers represent their ‘momentum.’ Quotes added for the sake of my physicist street cred.
You can see I didn’t sink any time into pretty graphics. I also put barely any work into the interface. The puzzles were created directly in code, and I even ‘solved’ them by editing the code. That’s all I needed to be able to explore the mechanic.
It took me a couple of days to code the basic interactions between particles, along with a dirt-simple UI, and another day or so to play around with it and reach a verdict.
The verdict? Thumbs down. Quoting straight from my notes at the time:
What I don’t see here is ‘manageable complexity.’ This is something that good puzzle games have. Meaning that the problem is complex, but breakable into smaller parts. …
I don’t see that here. I think the problem is that the simulation component places a big inferential gap between the effect the game enables you to have, and the outcome you’re trying to achieve. Solution steps are either trivially obvious (this atom’s will hit that one) or effectively unforeseeable (multiple atom interactions and multiple reflections rapidly lead to a board situation that can’t be inferred by a player from the initial configuration; that in turn makes it impossible to reason about the effect that small changes to the initial set-up will have). The latter is compounded by the fact that (in my opinion) key simulation rules are non-intuitive.
You can see I was pretty critical of an idea that I’d initially been hopeful about. That’s what you should do in the prototyping phase: generate ideas prolifically, and cull them mercilessly.
Eventually I hit upon a prototype that had legs. That’s a story for another post…
In this series I’m blogging about the development process for Delugional, the puzzle game I’ve been working on.
There a few broad choices you can make when you start to design a puzzle game. For one, you can broadly divide puzzle games into two categories: ‘authored’ and ‘generated.’ By ‘authored’ I mean a game where every puzzle has been designed by a human. Think World of Goo, or Cut the Rope, or Kami. By ‘generated’ I mean games where every puzzle you play is a fresh creation, generated in the algorithmic bowels of the game’s code. Think of Threes/2048/etc, or Minesweeper, or Dots.
