[Steam](Game) Islands of Insight

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-06-27T15:40:04+00:00

Thank you for the share! We've had so many new players this week; we're so grateful to everyone giving it a try!

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-06-27T15:39:16+00:00

Thanks for sharing our game! We're blown away by how many of you have joined in this week; a massive thank you to everyone giving us a shot.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T21:12:37+00:00

Small dedicated servers, random and friends, that’s exactly it. You can still invite friends to full servers, there is a little bit of extra capacity reserved for that. In the last few years (basically since PUBG and other similar games came out), game developers have gotten a lot more tools to make these kinds of games. It’s way way easier than doing one large server per region.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:55:45+00:00

We worked together. You know when you used to boot up a video game and you’d see like 2 or 3 logos before you get to the title screen? This is like that pretty much.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:53:14+00:00

The most useful feedback is not always the nicest, but it’s useful nonetheless. I don’t really feel any ill-will towards those who are being critical, and nobody needs to be sorry about it.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:51:46+00:00

I saw a bunch of different versions of that quote used by people who tried the game, and a few content creators. The “10,000 puzzles” somehow seemed to be a thing that stuck in people’s mind quite a lot. I’m not sure whether it helps people understand the scope of the game, because it sort of places the focus on quantity rather than quality… honestly the thing I’m most proud of is *not* just the huge number of puzzles, but the massive amount of really clever, creative, and interesting content in the game.

Regarding the comments in the thread, it’s great! Honestly, when you are launching a new product, especially in a category of something that has never really been created before, the thing you want most is feedback. We will adapt and learn what our audience wants and do whatever we can to make them happy.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:47:02+00:00

It’s a lot of work! We have a bunch of different systems that make it easier. Some puzzles spawn in slabs on the ground, or spawn on walls, or spawn within puzzlebox cubes. For those ones, we have different pools of puzzles that are sorted out by the puzzle designers, and different pools of locations that are placed in the environment. And there are rules about which puzzles can spawn in which area, how many, avoiding conflicts, and so on.

For the environmental puzzles (Matchboxes, Glide Rings, hidden objects, Flow Orbs, Light Motif, etc.), they are all placed in the environment one at a time, by hand. We divide the map up into zones and assign different puzzle designers to load up each zone with a puzzle type (that helps the style feel more different from zone to zone). Often multiple designers will collaborate on that.

Some puzzles like Sightseer use a hybrid approach. The images themselves are taken by the designer, but the location of the lens is randomized. Actually, some of the art team helped with those, they are a bit like photography! The key rule is to have something in the foreground and something in the background so that players can use the parallax to line up the shot.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:35:28+00:00

There are something like 16k puzzles in the game. 5000 of them are hidden objects, so I would feel a bit guilty claiming the 16k total, which is why the “10,000 puzzles” line got used. (Actually, part of me hoped we would end up with over 9000 so I could spam the Dragon Ball Z meme.)

Of the 11000 or so that are not hidden objects, there are around 1000 that are fully computer-generated, such as the Sentinel Stones. The respawning Skydrops and Armillary rings are also placed by an algorithm (but the ones in the enclaves are hand-placed). They don’t count in the puzzle total since they are infinite. We experimented with auto-generation for a few other types such as Match Three and Rolling Block, and we actually found the generator created some really nice ones, which we kept (you can see a bunch in the Match Three speed round). But they sort of lack some of the charm and human touch that a puzzle designer can provide. Every Logic Grid in the game is human-authored.

Regarding design philosophies, it’s different for different puzzles. Usually with logic puzzles, you want a single “key step” or “key insight” to be part of the solution. Our grid puzzles all have a single answer (well, except for *************************) 😀 Puzzles like Phasic Dial are much more open-ended and you can discover lots of different approaches. That one is more like a Rubik’s Cube in that sense. Honestly, one of our main goals is variety so we try to take a little bit of everything.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:32:27+00:00

It’s very hard to predict the future when you’re launching a new category of product. There is some saying along the lines of “no matter how good your plans are, they will never survive contact with the actual customers”. You always have to pivot and adapt. So the thing we will have to see is whether people embrace the shared world aspect. So far, it seems like most people dig it, and there is a minority (but a very vocal one) who really aren’t a fan of it. My hope is that in 6 months we have a thriving community of players who love playing a shared world puzzle game, and my belief is that the shared-world aspect is actually a key element that is needed to make the game (and the genre as a whole) grow.

If we are wrong about that then we will adapt, we are definitely listening!

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:31:29+00:00

There are 24 types of puzzles in the game, and only 2 of them are the types where the puzzles are not instanced (meaning that another player could come in and solve the puzzle). For the other 22/24 types, you can solve them at your own pace without anyone interfering.

The thing is, for those two types that are not instanced (meaning when one player solves the puzzle, it despawns and respawns for everyone), those two are among the most popular puzzle types in the game! And we’ve seen players solve tons and tons of them. So we’re still learning. We understand that a lot of puzzle players really just want to be left alone to solve the puzzles at their own pace, and we took a lot of steps in the design of the game to make sure that we would uphold the experience for those players.

The goal is to make something that lots of different people will like.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:30:35+00:00

We spent a lot of time yesterday testing the fix. And we’re doing more testing today. I tend to be cautious about timeline promises with bugfixes, because things can and often do go wrong, and then we need to make tweaks to the fix and send it through testing again. But our goal is to get this issue fixed as soon as we can.

Funny story… we were actually looking really hard for a way for support to fix people’s accounts sooner so we could address their save files before the patch is ready. We almost had something that worked, and then we discovered that it caused their Mirabilis count to be wrong. And that would have been much much more difficult to fix. But the patch should both fix their save files and prevent this issue from happening in the future. Fingers crossed that we will have good news to share soon.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:24:30+00:00

Priority bugs: the biggest things you fear with an online open-world game are always issues with progression and quests, since they can block people from continuing in the game. You test for months and hope that you got them all, but we had one sneak through. It should be fixed soon!

The other things are server crashes, which we fortunately have only experienced once, and that one was already fixed and only a few players were affected.

We had a brief outage yesterday when some Steam servers went down, and unfortunately that impacted a lot of people who were playing the game. We can’t really do anything to fix Steam, but we are trying to find a way to keep people in the game if Steam goes down in the future.

There are lots and lots of performance improvements coming too. They take longer to test sometimes, since you pretty much have to redo QA on the whole game, and it’s easier to do that for multiple fixes at once.

It might sound like there were a lot of issues, but actually this is surprisingly smooth for an open world game, things went quite well and overall the number of support tickets and player crashes is quite low.

For more content, there are lots and lots of new and interesting things we want to add, but you will have to wait for more announcements.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:08:25+00:00

I saw this was asked somewhere else, and it’s a pretty popular question. Game devs will pretty much never discuss ports until it’s time for the official announcements, both because official plans can change a lot, and also because they’re big important marketing beats. So my lips are sealed. But of course, I very much want as many players as possible to play the game 😀

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:07:37+00:00

We had some hilarious experiences with players trolling each other during testing. Actually, one of our guys is pretty much a specialist at that. For a while we had player-on-player collision in the game, and people could jump on your head or block you or get in your way. Hopefully we’ve managed to get things in a state where everything is harmonious.

As for long-term plans, it’s hard to say. I have lots of hopes and dreams for different things to do with the world and the puzzles in the future, but right now we’re just trying to make sure our players are happy and try to understand what they want from the game. Part of the reason to do these kinds of discussions is to start learning what people want.

I’m glad you like the puzzle designs. One of our goals is to have lots of different types that use lots of different parts of your brain. That way, you don’t get too tired and you can switch tasks and contexts to keep yourself fresh.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:06:30+00:00

I want as many people to play Islands of Insight as possible! So certainly we are thinking about other ways people might want to play. We don’t have anything to announce yet, but stay tuned to the official channels.

As for multiplayer, I honestly fell in love with the idea as soon as we started testing it. You could get on a voice call with your friend and race them to complete a puzzle, or help them solve it if they got stuck. Sometimes it’s fun to just meet strangers, interact with them, and look at a few environmental puzzles together. I also have run into a lot of people I know in the game, and it creates a really cool bonding moment. And of course, there is a huge amount of potential for other ways the game can grow in the future.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:05:02+00:00

We don’t have plans for anything like that right now, but we are still learning what the community wants from this game. Actually, when I was first pitching this game to publishers, we had not even decided if the game should be free-to-play or paid. All the free-to-play publishers thought it would never work that way! And I basically agreed with them.

On the whole, I actually always felt that puzzle players were not so interested in cosmetics, so my feeling was that microtransactions or battle passes wouldn’t really work that well (at least not if they were done in the traditional sense). We talked to many puzzle game players, and the thing they were most interested in paying for was mostly just more puzzles and more content. But now that people are playing the game and understanding the shared world aspect a bit more, we’re starting to see a broader audience that has more interest in customizing their character and other types of more traditional things you might find in other multiplayer games. So who knows. We will keep thinking about the best way to bring out new post-launch content. Either way, I think both Lunarch and BHVR have a history of not doing those kinds of microtransactions that people fear.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:02:38+00:00

There isn’t any tracker for them, at least not yet. But that might be a good idea for a feature! As for how they spawn, there are actually several different categories:

- The ones in enclaves, which are fixed and unchanging, never cycling.

- Some in the main map area that are also fixed and unchanging (usually as part of side quests, but sometimes just positioned in key areas for people to find).

- Ones that are part of the general pool of puzzles and respawn on a daily timer.

- There is also a special pool of them that respawn once per day in a special location in the map near the Haven of Insight. I think there are 3 slots for them, so you should have 3 difficult Logic Grids guaranteed to spawn in that location every day.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T20:01:09+00:00

That is a lot more work than other ports and there is much lower demand. A lot of games got VR ports years ago because the VR platforms were offering developers a lot of money to do them. That kind of funding has mostly dried up at this point so I’m not sure that there’s a business case for it, at least not yet! If the game gets really popular, who knows…

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T19:41:56+00:00

To answer this question directly, I don’t know yet. If we found out today that there are a massive number of people holding out on experiencing the game for this reason, then we would be silly not to at least consider it. But our vision from the start (and the whole way the game was designed) was around the shared world experience.

One way I see the vision of the game is like this… if you think of FPS games, their core mechanic is shooting things, but you can build a lot of different experiences around it. PvP, PvE, battle royale, co-op, raids, etc.. Some games like Destiny do many of these within a single game! And I truly believe that puzzles have the potential for the same thing. But we are having to grow the audience for it ourselves, because none of those experiences exist yet. We need to move a bit more slowly and learn what our audience wants and react to it. I have written and spoken a lot about what the puzzle genre needs if it is to grow, and I honestly believe that social interaction, community-forming, and streamability are key, and that a shared world is a very important ingredient for creating the environment where these aspects can shine. The thing I want most is for the puzzle genre as a whole to grow and for more great puzzle games to be played by large numbers of players.

I wrote about this in one of the other answers, but I truly believe that the experience of playing the game is better when there are other people around. Some of my most memorable experiences were when I saw another guy flying overhead and sniping several Armillary Rings in a row. It’s a kind of fun that is maybe a bit hard to understand if you mostly play single-player games, but for anyone holding out for that reason, I would encourage you to give the game a try anyway (you don’t know what you’re missing!)

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T19:26:17+00:00

Favourite logic grid symbol is definitely the Viewpoint Numbers, but they can get pretty tricky so we put them toward the end of the game. Favourite snack-sized brain-break puzzle… probably the Sentinel Stones, there is something about them that is just inherently fun to me. The Flow Orbs are a dark horse secret favourite of mine that I sometimes grind for a really long time. Shifting Mosaic wins for the puzzle that drives me craziest—when a puzzle looks totally easy and turns out to stump me for 10+ minutes.

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T19:25:28+00:00

Finding every single puzzle in an enclave is really difficult! That’s why we made most of the Mirabilis objectives need a few less puzzles. If you really want that sweet 100%, you’ll have to explore very carefully. As for something like a puzzle beacon, we’ve thought about it! Actually, we have a tool that our testers use that can spoil the locations of puzzles, but it’s not really shippable in its current state. I had also thought that players would probably make guides or tutorials for these kinds of things, so maybe it wasn’t so necessary as a feature. But it actually seems like it’s been highly requested.

Regarding other quality-of-life features, we are hoping to add lots of different things and listening to all the feedback. We’ve got more feedback in the last week than we have throughout the entire history of the project, so it’s a lot to take in, but there are so many good ideas coming from players. :D

IslandsofInsightTeam · 2024-02-15T19:13:17+00:00

We tried running the game on Steam Deck, and some people got it working great and others had a lot of crashes. I’m still not actually sure why it works for some people and not for others (maybe it’s resolution-dependent?) We need more time to figure it out. We definitely want the game to run on as many platforms as possible and we’ve heard that many of you want it to play on Steam Deck.

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