Post A MAZE update!


Hello

I am back from the A MAZE festival in Berlin where the game was presented both in the Open Screens and on the Game Jam section of the festival. I was really humbled and touched to see a lot of people take an interest in the project. It helped me find areas that needed polishing, which I've done in a new version I'm pushing out right now. It's not much and a lot more probably could be done ^^

  • The most important change is the new character sprites. The previous one were a bit misaligned and I wanted to change them but I was hoping to find an artist to help me. In the end I did a new version myself, to the best of my abilities, which isn't much. But one really dope thing that came out of it is that I was able to make a thick outline around the silhouette, to mirror the spirit of the text. I hadn't planned it, but it makes the silhouette feel smaller on the dark backgrounds, which I like a lot: during the middle section of the game, individualism is so prevalent that you don't even question it or notice it. The thick lines are there but are invisible, and the net effect is simply to make humans smaller and more miserable. 
  • Relatedly, I noticed that the performance issues I was having towards the end of the game were due to the blur function in Pixi which appeared to be costly so I precomputed a few blurring levels.
  • Finally, the other big change is that I've better tutorialized the late game in response to some people being a bit confused. Hopefully it should be easier to understand the mechanic of people grouping together.
  • At this point of the game the New Game + recolor feature didn't used to work, so I made it work  in case anyone enjoys coloring crowds specific tints ^^
  • I also slightly reduced the difficulty of pacman phases by spawning more consumables.
  • And I tried really hard to make the mobile phone experience less shit but I'm started to be really upset that webpages on phones dont have a reliable bottom where I can place things. 

We're getting close to the release date (May 31st), I don't foresee much changes but I'm always open if you have ideas or find stuff I haven't addressed. I would have waited to make this update the full release but I was really excited about the thick line emerging effect xD

Cheers

Files

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12 days ago

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