Hey guys, It’s been pretty busy here in the Space Budgie office; we’ve been hard at work removing irrelevant things, fixing and rejuvenating old things and adding a bunch new things to Glitchspace! With the release of Alpha 2.2, there’s a bunch of changes coming to Glitchspace that we thought we’d spend a little while talking about.

Legacy Mode

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the removal of Legacy Mode from the main game. Whilst it is a nice feature to offer both old and new players the chance to play an older version of Glitchspace, it was becoming harder and harder to maintain. With each new change made to the current build, there was always a chance of conflict with the older system, which has subsequently cost us many working hours finding and fixing issues. Unfortunately with so much work to accomplish on the main game in such a small amount of time, we believe it in our best interest to lay the Legacy Mode to rest with the release of Alpha 2.2.

R&D

In it’s place however we are adding a new R&D to the main menu. This R&D build works off of the system introduced in Alpha 2.0, and is a taste of the direction the new gameplay and puzzles are going. We are going to be regularly adding and changing the R&D build so keep an eye on our social media pages to see what new features get added. We were very proud of the release of 2.0, however it was pretty obvious after release that there were some issues that needed to be address. We did a handful of designs and prototypes on some of the more major issues and the current R&D build is the result of said changes in practice. Let’s take a closer look at some of the issues and how we’ve tried to address them:
The tutorial was ineffective In alpha 2.0 the tutorial, put simply, didn’t work. Play testers weren’t understanding what the animations on screen were doing (sometimes thinking them to be actually part of the puzzles). The glitched nodes that were designed to reveal information slowly to the player proved to be confusing and a lot of players didn’t notice the widget in the bottom right that displayed the axis. This has been the biggest headache for us over the last few months; Effectively conveying all the information a player needs to know about playing Glitchspace (from the UI, to the connecting of Nodes, to the interacting with red Cuboids in the world). And this is all before we’ve even begun to touch on the huge amount of actual functions the player can add to the canvas and how they interact with one another. It’s a task that has been done and redone countless times, but we believe we are finally getting to a point we are happy with. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in this instance we believe words say a thousand words. We’ve incorporated a step by step walk through to the first couple of Cuboids that each touch on a different UI and gameplay mechanic. These are usually one or two screens of text (accompanied by an animation) followed by an interactive step by step. Additionally we have added prompts that appear on both the tool and in the world that inform the player of simple things (like avoid data flow or pickup etc). Finally we’ve added a toggle-able help icon on the NULL interface that when clicked on will try and explain the various nodes you have added to the canvas.
The Puzzles Felt Very Binary There was usually only one way to solve each puzzle, and it could eventually be figured out through trial and error. Whilst this is sometimes the case for a lot of puzzle games, it was not in line with Glitchspace’s core design; we want people to come out of the game with a better understanding of basic scripting logic and it was common in Alpha 2.0 playtests (particularly in the tutorial) for players to simply connect nodes together without really understanding what they were doing. The general design mentality for Alpha 2.0 was simply “solve the cuboid and progress”. With R&D we’ve tried to change it to put more emphasis on the goal being to reach the end of a chamber to the portal. Obstacles prevent the play from simply walking there and thus the cuboids need to be manipulated in ways to overcome these obstacles. In Alpha 2.0, the player’s “inventory” of functions was tied to individual Cuboids. Each Cuboid would offer a variety of available functions specific to that puzzle. The reasons for this were to limit the player in their choices so as to avoid potentially breaking the puzzle (e.g. sending the cuboid 500 units off into the air), and to try and force the player into using a variety nodes. If the player could use Translate to solve every puzzle, Glitchspace would get dry very quickly. In R&D, we’ve changed it so that the “inventory” is an ever growing library attached to your tool. Your toolbox will display every function you have obtained up to that point and rather than removing certain functions for individual puzzles, the tool box will reconfigure during certain chambers. When reconfigured, some functions will appear glitched and will be unusable whilst in that chamber. Tool Upgrade Back in Alpha 1.82 you might remember that in the final stages of the game you gained the ability to fire code out of the gun. This feature felt somewhat underdeveloped and appeared very late in the game. In the R&D build we decided to isolate one of the more interesting elements of this mechanic (specifically firing a programmable cuboid from the tool) and bring this functionality to the forefront, introducing it much earlier to the player and ingraining it as one of the core mechanics. In the R&D build, creating a cuboid is now introduced during the tutorial as an upgrade to your tool. Creating cuboids and programming them separately to the ones in the world is fundamental to solving the puzzles. Think of it like your own Companion Cube.. oid. There are various other features and changes present in the R&D build and we’d love to hear what your thoughts on them are. Send any opinions, suggestions, and bugs to us either via our Steam Community page or various social media outlets, we’d love to hear from you. Alternatively we shortly be adding a link in the main menu to a feedback form that will allow you to share you thoughts directly to the development team.

Known Issues

The R&D Build is very much an in development build of Glitchspace and is likely to have numerous issues. Some of the one’s we’ve noticed and are working on fixing include: [olist]

There may be issues regarding Oculus, feel free to send us a message if you experience any problems

Occasional frame rate drops in R&D

Some minor UI issues [/olist]

Level Editor

On a final note, we teased a few months back that we were working on a level editor so that you guys could start building your own puzzle chambers. A working build is almost there and we hope to have a basic version out to you guys soon. It unfortunately won’t have Workshop support on release, but we hope to get it implemented shortly after. Keep an eye on this update as we’re super excited to see what you guys create!