Hi again.

I'm still Els. Are you still you?

I hope you're well, either way.

I mean that sincerely. Is it so hard to imagine that a stranger cares about your well being?

Welcome back to

Leggy! the Miraculous Robotic Arm!

Leggy the miraculous robotic arm
[is / will eventually be / might eventually be]
a game about a robotic arm. It is a physics-based puzzle game featuring unconventional controls following in the footsteps of Bennet Foddy's QWOP.

So what's new?

A lot has happened, and all for the better.
We've gone through a hefty change to our production process which has allowed me to refocus my efforts on design and programming challenges.
These changes have also enabled my team to create some absolutely amazing work.

Design

Before that though, let's get some of the boring stuff out of the way. As to be expected, the ALR and GDD have been updated. Notably, the game design documents have not required any significant alterations. The largest addition was documentation regarding the tag manager, texture crusher, and font randomizer that were created. Not all of the documentation for those is found in the GDD, however. More on those in a second. First, Leggy exists now! It's rigged and set up with inverse kinematics in Unity; it's extremely gratifying to see it come to life.

Leggy, Rigged & In-Engine

Our level design team has also been hard at work crafting some amazing experiences. I'm very pleased to report that my puzzle creation pipeline (full workflow found here) has proven to be popular both with the level designers themselves and with our producer! Check out this blockout for puzzle 08:

Blockout - Puzzle 08

The puzzle pipeline I established was very much a different workflow than what our level designers were used to and I'm so grateful to them for committing to the process! It has proven itself over and over again to be a fantastic way to organize the work of the designers such that they are able to self-manage the puzzle creation process. 

By being able to quickly check whether an idea for a puzzle is already being tackled by another designer we've been able to ensure a diverse range of challenges for the player. The process has also allowed for our level designers to rapidly iterate on a puzzle design in response to lead design's (that's me!) feedback. 

I feel certain that as we move forward into playtesting that the pipeline will continue to prove its value.

Non-Design Contributions

The Tag Manager

This is an extremely simple script that exposes a few drop-down menus to define what an object is.

Tag Manager Interface

This is designed to enable level designers to work more quickly when creating their puzzles. Simultaneously the tag manager allows the programming team to avoid inefficient string comparisons which are necessary when using Unity's built-in tag system.

The Texture Crusher

Also known as the texture downsampler, this is a suite of automation tools for Adobe Photoshop that allows for a texture artist to rapidly downsample as many textures as they'd like, simultaneously. I created the downsampler suite in order to emulate the appearance of the first disc-based console generation. Specifically, I'm hoping to capture the pixelated appearance of the Sony Playstation.

Texture Downsampler with Non-Square Original Image

The texture downsampler suite does resize images to a square resolution which can cause unexpected results with non-square original images. Considering that textures are always a square resolution, I consider this to be a non-issue for our use case.

The downsampler also has six different settings for texture artists to make use of.

Texture Crusher Samples

The Font Randomizer

In order to capture the shaky hand of a young child I wrote a font randomizer script that is designed to mix any number of fonts on a per-character basis. This proved to be significantly easier than require the 2D art team to hand-draw any and all writing created by the child character for the game.

Font Randomizer

Challenges & Solutions

I really can't understate how much smoother things have been running for us as a team due to the changes in our production process.

We're not out of the woods yet, though. Our programming team has still been dealing with seemingly insurmountable issues with Unity's physics engine. In order to remedy this we've moved away from doing purely physics-based gameplay. Instead, I made the decision to focus in on creating a working prototype as quickly as possible by faking Leggy's interactions with the world. The programming team has expressed relief at this change and I'm hopeful that we'll have a functioning electronic prototype very shortly.

The delay in the electronic prototype has also blocked our level design team, preventing them from testing their puzzles. To remedy this I've instituted Oz playtesting to begin gathering simplified gameplay data. Look forward to more information on that front in the next devlog! Thanks for sticking it out with us, I'll see you next time.