I showed the effect above creation on some message boards, and it got a good response, so I thought I’d share my work-flow. Perhaps someone else would find it useful or just interesting.

Result.

I’m going to explain how I made the teleportation effect you see in the gif above. It consists of several different particle systems attached to each other. I started off by creating the first one, and I wanted to create an effect of energy being sucked into the middle. Take a look at the final result first:

Start.

It’s very easy to create this, if we just break it down. To start off, create a new Particle System. It should look something like this:

Size and shape.

I started off by first changing the shape of my emitter. I wanted to get the initial shape ready, before I started tweaking. So in the particle editor, expand the Shape drop-down menu, and do the following:

• Change the shape to HemiSphere.
• Change the Radius to 2. ( this value depends on the size of your game-world.)
• Check ‘Emit from Shell‘ so that the particles are NOT born inside the hemisphere, but just on the border of it.

Now you will see particles getting created on the shell of the HemiSphere and fly outward. It might look odd because of the scale and speed of the particles, so let’s quickly change those. The following changes are done in the main part of your Particle System:

• Change the Size to 0.1 ( again, this value is relative to your game-world)
• Change the Speed to a negative value of -15. This will make the particles fly inward at a high speed.
• Turn off Looping. We want this effect to be a burst, not a loop.
• Change the Start Lifetime to 0.15 seconds. Our particles travel very fast now, if we let them live too long, they will escape the hemisphere. Set it to a value that will kill them when they reach the center. 0.15 seconds worked for me.

This is what I have so far:

Timing.

This still looks very odd, and that is because of our timing of the spawning of the particles. Let’s change this. The following changes are done in the Emission drop-down menu:

• Set Rate to 0.The rate defines how many particles per second should be spawned. We don’t really want this, we want just a burst or two.
•  Just below the Rate property, you will find Bursts. Click on the little black plus icon and set the Particles amount to 100 or whatever works for you.
• Add another burst in the same way, but give it a 0.1 second delay.

You should have something like this:

Look.

We’re now actually very close to getting the first particle effect done. We need to change the actual particles to be long pointy particles, instead of soft and round ones. Unity provides a feature that will stretch your particles in the direction they are flying. In order to use it, do the following in the Renderer drop-down menu:

• Change the Render Mode to ‘Stretched Billboards‘. This will stretch the particles based on their speed.
• Change the Speed Scale to 0.1 or 0.05 to increase the effect. The higher the speed scale, the longer the particles will stretch.

This is what I have so far: ( I slowed down the playback a little, so that the gif recorder could catch it. It was a little too fast hehe )

Color.

The only thing left for the first Particle Effect is the color. There is 2 things we want to change. We want it to be blue ( or whatever color you want ) and we want to get rid of the harsh transitions at the start and the end. We can do both of these in the Color over Lifetime drop-down menu:

• Click on the color and it will pop-up the Gradient Color Editor.
• You will see small buttons on the top of the bar and the bottom. The bottom ones control the color of the gradient. The top one control the opacity.
• For the bottom one, we only want to change the color to blue.
• For the top one, we want to add 2 new ones, and set the most left and right ones to be 0 opacity. This will make the particles blend from 0 opacity to 100, then just before they die, they will blend from 100 to 0.

This is how mine looks like:

And this is how the first Particle System looks like now:

The rest.

You can now go in, and tweak the values until you get your desired effect. For the next Particle Systems, I will just show the end result and the settings that I used. You should be able to understand it by now I hope .

And these are the texture I’ve used:

I’m also still learning, so if you think there’s anything I could have done better/easier, please do let me know!

We’ve added 6 new maps and 1 new game object; the teleport. The teleport is very basic, there are a couple of them on the map and you can decide which ones are active. You can only have 2 active at the same time, so by switching them on and off you can teleport around the map and make it to the finish. Here is how it looks.

Here’s a list of changes:

Alpha #3

• 6 new maps
• 1 new game object( teleport )
• New background music.
• New sound effects
• Graphics updates ( particle work and lighting)
• Some minor bugs/fixes

If you have the game on Desura, just update it, if you don’t have then you can get it clicking the link below. It’s 50% off

The reason we removed the maps  are mostly because we thought there were a lot of filler ones. We had 10 maps with just the pylon and/or arrows and we have decided to introduce newer and more interesting tiles quicker. We are hoping to introduce something new  every 5-6 levels.

The rate at which we update the maps are not decided yet, but we are hoping it’s not more than 1,5 weeks time. Also, because we removed 5 maps, we decided to not add 5, but 9 new ones. In these new levels, we have introduces a variation of the current arrow  which is only usable once. Also there is a new gameplay tile in the game that we call the U-Turn. It will always send you back where you came from. These are the last ‘arrow’ objects and from here on there will be way more interesting things added ( perhaps the teleport will be next).

The look of the game has changed as well. We have are now baking lightmaps to have a little bit more interesting lighting, but right now it might have too much contrast. This is of course work-in-progress so it’ll improve soon. The ones who have played the first ALPHA will have already seen a first version of them, but we’ll upload new screenshots for the ones that want to try it out.

And here’s a list of what we changed:

Alpha #2

Changes

• Removed 5 maps ( We decided it was too repetitive in the first 15 maps. So we removed filler maps. )
• Added 9 new maps ( Total is now 19 )
• Level 2 is now Level 1 ( We thought level 1 did not have any real purpose)
• Tweaked the lightmaps for some of the maps ( Played with contrast and added a spotlight, this is all experimental and might be gone in the next build.)
• The robot moves a little faster now.
• New camera controls( You can zoom the camera now with the scroll wheel and the panning around is more smooth. You no longer can pan outside of the map, it will bounce back)

Fixes

• Fixed the dark shadows in some of the maps ( This was caused by having 2 directional lights)
• Fixed the lighting on the tiles you place (They now make use of the light-probes, so the lighting information is closer to the neighbours )
• Fixed some maps having very easy solutions.
• Fixed a bug where you could place an object in the void of the map.

This is one of the luxuries of indie development I think. Doing a lot of experiments and knowing that you can change your mind as often as you’d like. Of course we try to not just keep changing because we can, but it’s nice to know that the option is there if we need it. We try to work with deadlines to not fall for the desire to change it AGAIN but sometimes it’s really worth it. Take a look at our initial look and then compare it to our latest screenshot:

Here’s a little video showing our editor tool that lets us switch between different map skins.  Right now we only have the old one and the new ‘portal’ skin. We called it portal because we were hoping to go for the same sterile look. ( Don’t mind the UI of the editor please, we’re working on it

I’m aware that it’s much easier to work like this when you’re a small developer, because it would cost a lot of money to do this in an AAA environment. So not everyone can afford that, but there are SOME who do. And one of those studios that actually can is Blizzard, perhaps that’s why their games always look so incredibly polished. Check out this video of how StarCraft 2 looked in the beginning. ( I do not mean the first couple of builds in the video, those were just very early builds. I’d like to point out the builds towards the end, where the game looks pretty much done, but they still took their sweet time to make it perfect.)

This means that the game will start off very cheap and slowly become the final price. If you have already bought the game( only a few people ^^) we think it’s fair to compensate you in another way, so please e-mail us so that we know who these people are.

Contact!

Shortly after we had enough of the game done to actually start making maps for it, I had a problem. How does one come up with good puzzles? How do you know if a puzzle is fun or how difficult it is? How do you know what the BEST solution to the puzzle is?

Problem.
One of the ways I thought we could make the puzzles was to find an algorithm for it, and generate as many as we want. This might work, but it gets very complicated very fast. For example, in our game some puzzles you can solve by just looking at them before you start the timer. This means you can clearly see where to put a pylon in order to block the robot. Generating maps for these types of puzzles is not so hard. But we also have puzzles where it not only matters WHERE you place the pylons, but also WHEN. For example, sometimes you have to let the robot reach a dead end and when he is coming back, you quickly place the pylon. See example below:

Puzzle timing.

These types of puzzles are a lot more difficult to generate with an algorithm and in our case it was not the best solution. So we decided to make them all manually..you know..using our brains.
At this moment we have roughly 50 maps and we hope to order them on difficulty as we do our alpha-testing. But how do we come up with these puzzles?

Iterations.
I bet there are a lot of nice ways to come up with puzzles but what I do sounds very straight forward to me. The first thing I do is, I roughly pick a width and height for my map. Now that I have the general layout I put in my START and FINISH tiles and simply hit PLAY. At this point the map is empty and the player has no objects in his/her inventory to use. I simply observe what the current solution is( if there is one) and I ruin the solution by putting an object in his path.

Now I hit PLAY again and I observe to see if there is a solution. If there is not, I give the player one object to place and I play the game again. When I find the new solution, I decide to block that route too. Now the puzzle is getting more difficult. From here on I can keep repeating this as often as I want. Find the solution and block it. The more often you do this, the more difficult a map gets.

A big part of creating good puzzles is the editor you use. We have created several little tools in our editor to help make things easier. Here is some of those tools that help us make the puzzles:

• Map sharing. Everyone using our editor has a user-ID and we save every map online using that ID. This makes it easy for that person to share the maps with friends so that they can play and give feedback. We don’t store any models or textures of course, but only the position of the tiles and the type of tiles. This way most maps don’t even reach 1 KB in size.
• Replays. Now that every map is stored somewhere online, we thought it would be cool to add replays. This means every time someone plays the game, every decision he made in the game is stored, and we can play it back. So if we encounter someone with a VERY fast record, we can take a look and see how they did it. We can also use this data for the ‘hint’ system. So that the best solution is fed to other players as hints.
• Records. This is a bit similar to the one above, but this means that we store some of the records like the fastest player or the least amount of tiles taken to finish a puzzle. We can use this data to help us find ‘secret-easy-solutions’ or simply for the high-score table.
• Visual help. In our editor, when you are play testing your new map, you can turn on a preview of your path. With a series of white dots on the floor, we predict the movement of the player and when you put a wall in front of his path, you can see it change in real time ( see image )

Path preview.

We hope to release the editor soon on Desura. So if you have the alpha version you’ll be ready to try out making maps If you don’t have it yet, you can help us by supporting our alpha-fund program below.

Click the following link to go to the RoboMinion Desura profile page.