Three out of five of Work of Fiction’s puzzles are starting to function.

I’m also considering dropping five puzzles so I have 20 solid ones total.  Four sets of five puzzles instead of five sets of five puzzles.  Once you beat four out of five in a set, you unlock the next set.  This way there’s always at least one other puzzle you can work on if you’re stuck, and all five puzzles are different styles of puzzle solving, so hopefully this is enough to avoid lots of potential ragequits.  Also this means that in order to beat the game at all, you have to beat at least 16 puzzles.

Here’s a few vague screenshots of the first three puzzles.  Keep in mind that these are all pretty abstract, so fret not if you don’t understand what’s going on.  Also they’re pixellated on purpose.

Startling how quickly I’m getting through this project now that I’m just doing it myself.

Also, I got an update on the Company port to the iPhone–It’s starting to work, but the physics are still a bit wonky.  Either way–progress!  I wonder when it’ll be done?  And I wonder how well it’ll do?  I’m a little nervous about it because Company isn’t the kind of game that I think of when I think “iPhone game.”  Stuff like Angry Birds is best suited, where the game is tuned to be playable for very short amounts of time.  Company is only one little experience, and it only lasts half an hour…will anyone buy this thing?

Until today, I had two programmers working on the code for Work of Fiction, but I’ve gotten sick of waiting around for them to respond to my emails (most notably, they haven’t said anything to me in about three weeks), so I’m just gonna do this shit myself. This also means I’ve got a solid opportunity to make the game a little more interesting to play.  Link-A-Pix is a very cool puzzle, but for most people, there’s no way it’d be interesting enough to do 25 times in a row, even if it’s gradually getting harder/more complex/etc over time.

Instead, I’m gonna try to make five abstract puzzle types and have five levels for each.  They’ll cycle, so you’ll play one level of each puzzle type, then play a harder level of each puzzle type, etc.  Five cycles total.

No change in the story, by the way.  Just gonna make it more fun.

Work of Fiction is still chugging along, but it’s in the uninteresting parts of development right now, so I’m not going to waste you time by talking about it.  Instead, here’s some much more interesting babble about Fix.

At this point, I’ve tried three times to make a satisfactory smoke simulation for this game.  The first was bitmap based, and looked pretty good, but didn’t behave correctly.  The second was using a 2D fluid solver (Navier-Stokes equations) to simulate the entire volume of air in the area, and then solve density of smoke separately.  I didn’t get particularly far into it before realizing that the math was a little over my head and the results wouldn’t be consistent enough to be a central game mechanic.  Try out Plasma Pong for a demonstration of this:  It’s fun as hell and really pretty, but it’s way too chaotic to be used in a puzzle game.

This third one isn’t as fancy and doesn’t involve as many hip buzzwords, but it’s definitely my favorite so far.  It isn’t physically “correct,” but it’s already looking fantastic and in terms of usability in a game, it’s damn near perfect.  It’s stable as hell and incredibly predictable.  I’m gonna have endless fun figuring out ways to use this thing as parts of puzzles.