#colors based on the main menu's dark mode because it's cool as hell

[crow-with-a-pencil]

First thing you see after you die

CotL au by @intistone

[celleryeller]

Holy shit! They have a game development commentary mode!! That’s super fucking cool!! I’ll write down answer to my questions and general cool shit here

The sizing was all just proportional to the distance it moved- twice as far away means twice as big.

The level designer had to careful adding barriers everywhere, because objs could be picked up from any distance so long as they were visible

Originally the game was shipped without controller support! I think that’s a pretty good example of “don’t ship with something that sucks”

I didn’t notice it, but they chose to have interactable objs a contrasting color to the background! Like a yellow chess piece when the walls are beige and greeny cyan.

Art direction was based on questions, like “what would someone in the early 90s think of for a futuristic testing testing site? What would they do with a shoestring budget but infinite time?” That’s an interesting way to phrase art questions! Not “what do I want out of this” but a “ what would someone else make?”

The introduction was designed to solve problems that occurred in playtesting, teaching the players how to do big-to-small and small-to-big and dealing with distance. I like how they did that! I thought the tutorial was GREAT, and it all came from playtesting research!

Players would get lost during infinite hallway moments, so the art direction added some uniqueness to locations and people stopped getting lost.

The music had a main inspiration, piano solo jazz by Bill Evans.

There are secret blueprints in the levels. Like I suspected, they’re top down wireframes of the level!

The principal artist mentioned that they got one pink hallway down in terms of clutter and noise, and that helped with the later iterating

The game commentary itself doesn’t spoil any tricks and Easter eggs with commentary; it’ll only play their explanations if you find it yourself. That’s pretty good, to keep the player experience in tact like that while sharing about everything you can

Secret areas were added as a response to what players did/tried to go. I’m really enjoying how much they seemed to respond to players instead of the fallacy of “ the players are playing my game wrong”. Must’ve been loooots of playtesting

At some point, they had to stop asking realism questions- “why is this door up there?” And just say. It just is. And that’s the puzzle.

Sometimes they chose to not play with perspective, but expectations.

…Wow! They STILL have a bunch of new varieties for the loading screens!! That’s so cool!

Each level was originally supposed to be a story; the idea was scrapped, but the horror level (with the purpose of “making the player scared of their own shadow”) stayed.

Their choice of teleportation cuts was inspired by movie cuts!

They put a commentary node that says “boo” over the scary door that closes on its own. I officially love these developers.

The scary level also introduces the idea, that’s important for the end of the game, that not being able to see, that pitch black doesn’t mean somethings there.

This horror level, due to the fact that everything’s dark as hell, is the only one that makes me itch to just look up where the secret star room is.

Horror Level also plays with an idea I’ve been chewing on recently, about light and dark. Because this is a video game, the human ability to adjust your eyes to the dark is absent. There’s one puzzle where you need to walk backwards into the dark and see the objects via contrast on the light.

Also. The pause menu has nice piano music. Which, although most people aren’t sitting on the pause menu for long periods of time, it’s really nice for me to pause and listen to something nice as a write up each paragraph,

Something I noticed myself doing is jumping over dark spots, because the game as shown it’s not afraid to make a pitch black spot on the floor a giant pit. As a jump over, my heart does a little “auhghha” despite the fact that everywhere else in Horror Level I’m fine and aware that nothing scary is going on.

Sometimes the lights in the horror level look like glowing eyes of giants creatures, and that part stills scaresa me some. But it’s just my perception, nothings really there.

FOUNF ANOTHER NEW COLLECTABLE FUCK OFFF THATS GREAT. The chess piece collectibles really required thinking outside the box- I found this one while searching every nook and cranny for the star room, and ended up using the flashlight object as a jumping platform. That’s a really cool reward! And it breaks the replay problem of doing what worked the first time!

End of level again and I didn’t find the star room… damn.

Whenever the turn on the lights, they talk about the frame rate issues they needed to work around. Suddenly hitting everything with light tanker performance, so they chopped up the room. The room is still a little choppy on the frames, but it’s worth it for the joke.

One new tutorial is introduced as just a sign that says “press lt to return” which they comment is the most unread sign in the game. Ah. The horrid fact that players Don’t Read Signs

I liked how they mentioned that the cloning mechanic would always make players smile. Because that’s a really fun thing to notice! And it has all the right parts to make it fun! The little ascending pop noise for each cluck, the way it makes things tiny, the initial unexpectedness of “huh?” It’s great

The player can changes sizes by changing the size of their doorways they walk through. They worked around this by making kind of “reset doorways” that scaled to the player size before letting you move into the next scale puzzle. That’s cool

They don’t have any commentary on the hidden piano :[

When changing size, they had to adjust lots of things- one of them being gravity. That one’s noticeable, in fact, I just made a huge object take multiple seconds to fall because I was tiny. Sometimes you have to ignore physics to get a better feel.

They were shortish on time for the elevator posters, so the artist just. Put their cat in there. More games should have the developers cats featured.

The Labyrinth level is SO good. The alarm coming in right before teleporting you back, then the sudden room change that completely fucks with perception. Very excited to hear them talk about it. ( they didn’t that much :[ )

The infinite elevator trick, which a node explains, get explained even more by the node’s existence, which marks one elevator that you keep coming back to.

In Whitespace, The paradox world breaking effect is cool, and they talk about how they struggled to get it. It reminds me of the paradox look from Outer Wilds. I also super like the filter on the camera that makes everything look bleary eyed, like you just woke up.

The design choice to fiddle with perception so much you get rid of depth perception is also so incredible. Everything flat and black or white is just a great exercise of how much can you fuck with. How much can you play with the medium?

The hallway puzzle I got stuck on was actually added in, because with no infinite hallways players immediately started rubbing up on everything and found the solution.

The end sequence, was a reflection of the game. The music was originally disliked by the level designer. The movie cuts lining up with the piano was SUPER cool.

During the credits, they said “the design goal of this level was to show you who made the game.”

Thank you to everyone at Pillow Castle for this wonderful game!

Game design thoughts- Superliminal

I’ve decided, for shits and giggles and bettering my analysis skills, that I’ll write and post some thought about the game design of games I’m playing for the first time. Not a rating or anything, just a sort of what I learned from it

I just finished Superliminal on the Xbox. Only took around 2 hours for a solid first playthrough. Made in Unity, released 2019.

The main mechanics were around perspective. Unfortunately, this playthrough wasn’t completely blind, because there was a gif set or promo trailer floating around Tumblr a couple years ago, and it showed the mechanics before I got a chance to figure them out myself. But, the premise is picking up objects, and their size depends on the actual perspective when you drop it.

I think those mechanics are pretty fucking cool. I would love to see how the idea was originally prototyped. Or how they came up with the idea. Honestly tomorrow morning I might look into if the creators have done any interviews or anything.

The tutorial was pretty sick though. Instead of ui elements floating and telling you what to do, everything was written on objects in the game. My favorite was “press a to jump” being on a wet floor sign.

Narratively, it did make me ponder about brute forcing puzzles, and trying the same thing over and over. There was one puzzle I was stuck on near the end that I only decided to change perspectives on after I noticed the classic game trick of teleporting the player to create a feeling of infinite looping. While I didn’t walk away fundamentally changed, I did gain a new perspective on how I do puzzles.

The juice was pretty good, too. It got me giddy to pull every fire alarm and use up every fire extinguisher just because the option was there. There might also be achievements for doing that each level? Idk. Superliminal also had some good (although a little too loud) controller shake when an object was made huge and dropped on the ground. There was text I couldn’t read on papers that I wanted to read. The loading screens were great too, and while the bar animations weren’t accurate, the variation and weirdness for each one made up for it.

The limitations, unfortunately, were a touch obvious. The edges of light could shine through objects in a way that initiated something was up. Too many objects bumping around (which didn’t happen often) made a god awful sound. Screen hiccups happened a lot. Honestly, all of it was bearable, but the first one in particular just made me think about how light does that and it pisses me off as a developer that I can’t control it.

Other thoughts:

The walking around and setting felt very reminiscent of The Stanley Parable, especially in the repeated opening segments.

Music cutoffs were well placed and heavily affected the tone.

Late game played heavily with dream with dream sensation, and so perfectly emulated the dream feeling of looking at everything right side up while it feels like you’re laying down.

Played with the medium. I mentioned earlier that it used teleportation for infinite hallway tricks, but at some point it just started teleporting you for the purpose of being jarring.

On a similar note, it loved to play with the first person camera. It knew that you couldn’t look behind you, so it had complete free range to silently change whatever you weren’t looking at. Then when everything was breaking down, it started fucking with you and changing things as you looked at them, so you only saw the change once you moved

There was one level intended to be eerie, and it did that so well it made me google “is Superliminal scary.” The answer is no. I’m just a bit of a paranoid fraidy cat. It ended with a joke so good I instantly forgave it for making me scared.

The humor was also pretty good. It’s a good reminder that games can bet serious AND a little bit silly with it.

The piano music was superb

The options menu was simple and bland. It didn’t need to be anything else. Everything it had could simple fall under “gameplay” or “audio” settings.

Conformed to the wonderful idea that text to speech voices are evil. Fuck tik tok.

Overall, it was a sick game! I might do a couple more replays tomorrow. Or I’ll move to something else.