This is difficult even without the looping 3D space, but that just makes it even harder.ĭuring playtesting, I’ll often see unexpected ways of solving puzzles. The biggest difficulty has been signposting, or guiding the player to where they need to go without using words, characters, or a map. When it comes to making these puzzles work in looping three-dimensional space, what are the the biggest concerns? Was there anything which emerged in playtesting you didn’t expect? I’ve actually always been interested in topology and architecture, one could argue those ideas were always there, just didn’t find their way into the game until much later. World wrapping and architecture were not introduced until much later. Changing the environment felt more like changing the problem. I changed the mechanic to having the player rotate, because the metaphor is that the problem (the environment) stays the same, but now you’re seeing it from a different perspective. after the first rotation, all the objects ended up in the corner). The first version actually had the environment rotate instead of the player, but that led to a lot of design problems (e.g. The project was initially called Relativity, based on the Escher print of the same name, and it centered mainly on the mechanic of changing gravity and walking on walls. I had studied physics in college and had worked in a nuclear physics lab before, so the idea of exploring physics thought experiments through games was really appealing. Escher’s work, with a focus on puzzles like Portal. The idea was to make a game based on M.C. The game initially started off as a small project to learn Unity. Mostly, it was because of the size of that - a short 5 minute experience, which felt very doable at the time. When I played Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, that’s what made me think I could make a game. He showed me games like Journey, Flower, and Braid. The problem was I got typecast as “the balloon guy.” I looked for other mediums to work with that would break me out of that mold, trying glass, metal, but none of them I really connected with.Ī friend of mine was really into videogames, and showed me a lot of the work that was being done in the indie game space. William Chyr: I was an installation artist before entering games, primarily creating large-scale installations out of balloons for science museums and art centers. ZAM: What was the seed of what would become Manifold Garden? The level design is so complex and fascinating that its lead architect, William Chyr, gave a talk about it at the Game Developers Conference last year. A building that is unapproachable with the gravity pointed in one direction may become accessible when you tilt gravity by 90 degrees. You may need to send a device or a stream of water from one version of a structure to an adjacent one. Sorry if you didn’t realize you had vertigo before this moment.īut unlike the glitch video, Manifold Garden‘s “parallel universes” are plain to the naked eye - and they’re incorporated into puzzle solving. Honestly, I feel I’m belittling this game by even making a comparison like that. The first thing that came to mind when I first saw it demoed was actually that half A-press video which became a short-lived meme a while back, in which a glitchrunner sends Mario to successive “parallel universes” by exploiting a level’s outer boundary. In games, we’re accustomed to seeing toruses like this working in two dimensions (think walking to the top of a map in an RPG and reappearing at the bottom), but the third is a little more elusive. Keep going in one direction, and you’ll end up where you started. Many of its early levels are designed around a triple torus, in which the three dimensions we’re most familiar with - length, width, and depth - loop back around into themselves. Manifold Garden is, in short, a game that’s incredibly easy to grasp visually but nearly impossible to pin down in text. The entire universe loops inside itself, an action in one plane affecting all identical planes outward into infinity. If you’ve played Antichamber or Portal, you can get the general gist of how it plays: three-dimensional spaces, while initially seeming ordinary, unfold into complex, non-Euclidean structures like something out of an Escher drawing. One of the more understated titles on E3’s show floor this year was Manifold Garden, an upcoming first-person puzzle game which challenges players to think outside the box - in a major way.
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