I have recorded myself working with the editor to show you all how a level comes from simply being lines and boxes of physics into the water-color world of Backworlds. It is a time-lapse running at a brisk pace and should give you a good idea of the process. Note that I did not prepare in any way making this, I just came up with something as I went along, however I did work with this particular theme for the demo. By the end of the video the level is in a “first-pass” state and is missing smaller details, particle effects and so on.

You will notice moments that seem like the video freezing, but it is actually just me selecting images from the editor menu (which pauses the game) and you can’t see the windows dialog for that in the video. Also there is a part of the creation process missing in the second video for some of the interior in the backworld, so you might notice a skip there.

Hope you enjoy watching!

Part 1 (Music: Final Fantasy VIII – Seasons OC Remix by Ziwtra)

Part 2 (Music: Final Fantasy X – A Fine Place to Live OC Remix by halc)

Today I will show you something from the game-play scripting for Backworlds. In other words, what we do (partly) to make stuff happen in the game. We use a scripting language called Lua which we write in external text files that are loaded into the game. The advantage of this is that we can write functionality without having to recompile the game, reloading the level is enough.

I will begin by saying that Anders has moved a lot of the things we used to do with this into the engine and tied it to objects in the editor, making life a little easier for us when creating levels. But it is great for testing new ideas and we still have to use Lua in a lot of special cases and custom events. But enough explaining, let me demonstrate in this two part video!

Note: I make a mistake in the video by sampling the statue position every frame rather than only once in the OnCreate function, causing the object to move down very fast.

Part 1

Part 2

Herp derp ork bork!

Winter is upon us, but before we check out for the year we’d like to give you a little more hard information about the game. This is subject to change as development goes on, but we feel reasonably comfortable with the scope at this point.

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Following up on the last blog post by Anders, I thought I would talk a bit about the art of the other Sense of Wonder Night level
we prepared. You can view the level in the video above, which is the same sequence we used for the presentation.

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A few weeks ago we started initial playtesting for a big bunch of new levels. So I am going to write a bit about how we go about with testing and how we use the observations gathered.

First off, Ron Carmel at 2D Boy has a nice writeup about rules for playtesting that anyone interested in these things should check out.

The How

During the development of the demo, we only did in person testing. We sat the player down at a computer and let them play without us instructing, only quietly taking notes. If they got stuck for a long time we would however give them hints, but our goal was, and is, to not have any kind of hint system so those occasions made it quite clear we needed to redesign the puzzle.

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