We’ve prototyped a lot of games over the last few months, some of them were made and discarded within 2-3 days, others had a much longer development process and Slingshot was one of those games. Since I previously posted a concept video of the game here on our blog I thought I do a Postmortem on the project.

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This prototype is one in a series of time mechanic puzzles we’ve been exploring recently. Tian and I created this prototype and with some additional coding help from the other Voxels. It progressed from concept to prototype in just three days. While this concept as it stands will probably not be something we develop further, it has spawned some very interesting derivative ideas and creations.

I particularly believe in the navigation controls and we’ve been developing some quite special with them. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you this in the near future.

Time-Travel Treasure Hunt is a an observation-puzzle game where the players goal is to locate stars which are hidden in a scene. The scene changes over time, playing back a simple story, and the player can follow the events from start to finish or can reverse and scrub time however they please. As the scene unfolds, objects and patterns will collide and overlay each other to form a star-shape. The player must observe these shapes, and click them at the right moment to identify where they are hidden.

Here’s an example of 3 animated shapes dancing and having an absolute blast in the snow. Can you see when they align to form a star?

Click the link below to play the game! Rules:

• Locate the stars in the animation and click on them when you spot them. We don’t mean the obvious stars in the night sky, but the hidden stars formed by shapes and patterns, as well as pink stars.
• Use the scrubber to scrub time backwards and forwards, and use the arrow keys to jump a single frame at a time.
• Pink stars will briefly appear for just a split second and it’s only possible to click them when they are visible.
• Other stars have been cleverly hidden in the environment and take shape when objects align.

There a total of 10 stars. See if you can find them all. Click here to play:  Time-Travel Treasure Hunt [35 MB]

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‘Slingshot’ is a game concept that I worked on myself and it has not been made into a playable prototype (yet). With Slingshot I set out making a concept with complete focus on player input. The idea is to start designing something that feels good to play, where the motions makes sense and are designed for a touch device.

The first draft of this game idea was done on paper, trying to draw interesting puzzles and patterns to trace lines around – When the paper-prototype seemed interesting, I proceeded to put together a video to explain the idea to the other Voxels (you can see the video below). The next step is to build a playable prototype, and then from there come-up with an interesting theme and mood for the game. This is just one type of development process we’re trying, in another project it might go in the reverse order (Theme -> Gameplay vs. Gameplay -> Theme).  One of the great benefits in working at The Voxel Agents is that we get to find these things out as we go. I am given a lot of freedom and leeway in how I approach game design and prototyping.

Here is the pitch-video for Slingshot. Keep in mind that this NOT our next game but one of many concept we’re working on:

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Tom	Simon	Tian	Matt	Henrik

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