There were a ton of cool things at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to go – it coincided with my time at home after LA and before Japan, and I got a free pass! While I could ramble on and on about the different things I saw, I'll instead leave you guys with a neat game that I played there. “Continuity” is a cleverly designed puzzle-platformer where you have to move around tiles in order to navigate through a series of mazes. This game was also the winner of the GDC Independent Games Festival for Best Student Game so congratulations to the developing team!
I love the simplicity of this concept. It is like a combination of a sliding jigsaw puzzle (the ones with 1 piece missing) and a majorly toned down Mario game. The tile moving is simple because you do not have to arrange a whole lot at a single time. Everything is very polished and the level design is very clever. Even though there are 31 levels, they vary enough to remain interesting and challenging. New concepts are also intuitively introduced so you get the hang of things pretty quickly.
One of my favorite parts about this game is the music. When you are zoomed out on the tile arranging screen, a soothing piano/bell track plays with a subtle, muted rhythm track in the background. When you zoom in on your character the soft, background track comes forward and blasts this epic, almost-techno-like piece. It makes me feel like I’m on a quest to save the world even though I’m just this little bathroom sign character collecting keys to unlock doors. The music tracks transition seamlessly and they really add something special on top of the simple controls and graphics.
One note: the maze tiles must match up EXACTLY on the side that you are trying to connect. This can be frustrating at first because something that seems to make sense may not actually work. But I don’t think this is a big problem because it narrows down the possibilities and helps you to hone in on the right path to take.
Have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment