Last week, we shared a GIF of the boulder dungeon on reddit comparing how it looks before and after our artist puts in assets. Our mouths dropped to the floor when we found ourselves on the front page of reddit—the freakin’ front page! This, added to an already amazing week at Casual Connect, made us absolutely speechless.
After going through the 1000+ comments of kind words, constructive feedback, intelligent discussions, and of course harsh words attempting to poison our soul, we’ve summarized it and highlighted our favorite ones. The internet is not the internet without someone being needlessly insulted by your posts. We had a good laugh and love the joy you guys bring to us.
First off, what’s going on in the image?!
What is going on is called “white-boxing,” and is only a slice of what happens during the development of a game. Because level designing is an iterative process that takes a lot of testing and editing, our level designer prepares the levels with placeholder assets (like boxes) that can be used to quickly prototype the basic layout of the level. Art takes a lot of time and is not as flexible to changes. Compounded with the fact that every level is unique, it only makes sense that the least resource-intensive workflow is for the level designer to finalize the level before passing it over to the artist to beautify it. Hence, what you see in the right scene is the final result of the boulder dungeon after prototyping was completed.
As you may have noticed, some sections of the left scene have art assets, such as the mice and the boulder. These assets, which are integral towards gameplay, were already created; therefore, it only made sense that we take advantage of them rather than use a blank capsule for the character or a white sphere for the boulder.
The game looks really polished!
At this point the core components and framework of the game have already been fleshed out. In preparation for Steam Greenlight and Casual Connect, we put in extra effort into polishing a few levels to a nearly shippable quality in order to demonstrate how the game will look and feel once it’s finished. Some of you indicated that this approach is called a “vertical slice.”
What’s the name of the game?!
The game is called Mind the Trap. The reason I didn’t post the name in the title is that due to Reddit’s anti “self-promotion” rules, I have often in the past been blocked from posting when in reality I simply just wanted to share some cool content. So in order to hopefully get this post past the rules, I left out the details. I know it must’ve been frustrating, but it was really neat to see you guys find it!
Learn to spell you stupid piece of s***.
Yeah… I messed up… Typos happen, and when they do, apparently you anger people so much that they wish death upon you. Damn I angered this guy badly! I will try to not make more typos in the future, I swaer!
Dissonance Entertainment 