Manifold Garden (Escheresque Puzzle Game) Teaser | Hacker News Reader

Manifold Garden (Escheresque Puzzle Game) Teaser

manifold.garden

51 pointsSonOfLilit16 comments

This reminds me a lot of the game Antichamber: http://www.antichamber-game.com

Reminds me more of Monument Valley. Though Antichamber is a better game :-). http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/

It reminded me of PSP game Echochrome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC_RJdwAgqw

Are there any hints as to what the puzzles are?

Also, I only see "impossible architecture" as in very large structures, and floating elements, nothing that plays with perspective like Escher.

I appreciate that a teaser is going to hold back on some information, but I reserve the right to consider being teased a frustrating experience.

Submitter here. I twitted the creator in the hope that he'll answer this great question, because I have no idea.

In the meanwhile, seems like the Steam page has some more info?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/473950/Manifold_Garden/

Thanks for sharing it here!

I've played development versions of the game. Hopefully I'm not spoiling too much, but there are certainly puzzles. They are super mind-bending and _different_. Definitely gave me the "now you're thinking in portals" feeling.

The other thing the puzzles reminded me of were the mechanics of Braid, where solving the puzzles requires a lot of un-learning about the way video games are supposed to work.

"Inception like" gravity inside rooms - switching gravity between different walls to move puzzle elements around + taking advantage of wraparound to move between levels on the map (the "outside")

Puzzle gameplay demo: https://youtu.be/InqcFGj51y8?t=12s

Hey, developer of Manifold Garden here. The teaser was released quite a while ago when I changed the name of the game. A lot of the game wasn't finished then, but I needed to get something out, so focused on the architecture.

Here is a development update video I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDay02tqXw&t The first minute goes over the kinds of puzzles that you can expect in the game.

I also gave a talk at GDC about the level design in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2zmmcEryw&t It doesn't go over specific puzzles, but it gives you a sense of the kind of thinking you can expect to do in the game.

The music and general aesthetics reminded me of Tranquility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLhw_zJiFo

I wonder if this game will have a similar degree of simple mechanics...

There's a great GDC talk about level design for this game by its creator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2zmmcEryw

Fyi, William Chyr streams his work on this game on Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/williamchyr

I love the shading style - is this simply called 'flat shading'? There's still a subtle gradation. Talking of puzzle 3D games, I really want Portal 3.

When I was in highschool I found a demo for a driving game that had a 3D engine based on splines (so all of it vector).

The aesthetics were amazing. This reminds me of them.

I recently spent a whole night googling and eventually traced it to a guy called Zotoaster based on some old gamedevboards.net forum posts, but I contacted him and he says it's all long gone. Not even a screenshot left :-(

I would call it cel shaded. But I think a lot of the impact is simply due to the palette and simple aesthetic choices of the designer.

Developer of the game here! It's actually not cell shading. That usually has a threshold with the colors so that it looks more like a comic here.

There's a few things going on: edge detection, screen space gradient, and lack of textures. The lack of textures is what makes it feel like cell shading, but I'm not actually thresholding any of the colors.

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