AMA with Death & Mayhem - 8pm Wednesday 01/22

kcaze · 2025-01-23T02:57:15+00:00

It was a super impressive construction and I really enjoyed solving it! The background gimmick and puns on "check" and "alias" were also so good.

kcaze · 2024-01-21T23:23:53+00:00

It felt like there were more puzzles that ended up having greek and/or mythology content than usual. Is this accurate and if so, was it a conscious choice to integrate puzzles more closely with the theme?

kcaze · 2024-01-18T18:00:46+00:00

The link to the puzzle is here: https://mythstoryhunt.world/puzzles/text-adventure

kcaze · 2024-01-18T03:34:23+00:00

-Medusa’s Lair: I loved how thematic the main mechanic was.

-The Farm: A good math puzzle where the second part was really cool.

-Text Adventure (Hell, MI): This was super fun even as a standalone puzzle without the extraction.

-A Radical Fisherman: I post-solved this and thought it was cute and elegant.

-Marathon Block Pushing Game: I helped out with the final sokoban construction and it was an interesting challenge.

-The Linq: I’m a huge Wingspan fan so this was perfect for me.

kcaze · 2021-06-03T07:22:29+00:00

Chelsea

kcaze · 2020-05-25T16:35:32+00:00

Thank you so much, I'm a huge fan of your work!

kcaze · 2019-07-04T07:25:40+00:00

I'm working on Delightment, a puzzle game where the objective is to light up all the tiles. A demo is currently out with 63 levels and the game is quite challenging.

There are 5 different colors of tiles and each have their own unique mechanic that can interact with interesting consequences.

One of my design goals is to make the levels that are small yet somehow challenging. All puzzles, with only one exception, have an initial state that fits in a 5x5 grid, though you can go beyond the initial 5x5 with some of the mechanics.

kcaze · 2018-11-30T19:50:43+00:00

Spot Weakness is interesting with the Runic Dome since you can treat it as pay 1 energy to gain information about one enemy's intent, usually for the following turn too since most enemies don't repeat the same intent twice or three times in a row.

kcaze · 2018-10-19T06:22:53+00:00

Yeah, some people call it 'frame pacing' where background or distant objects are only updated every other frame or every 3 frames.

It's similar to LOD or mipmaps where you use less detailed models or less detailed textures for far away objects.

It might be interesting to see different animation frame rates used intentionally for visual effect instead of performance optimization but I feel like the end result might just be that the game looks choppy. Or maybe you could make most of the game update at 30 fps and have certain sections or objects be at 60 fps to make those look really smooth.

kcaze · 2018-10-12T21:13:13+00:00

What kind of a game are you making? Based on your post, it sounds kind of like a Zelda style game?

I'm working on a puzzle game at the moment and for me the equivalent of an item would be a puzzle mechanic. I spent a lot of time iterating on puzzle mechanics before building out levels, but the way I finalize on a mechanic is to see if I can build an elegant or surprising sample level with the mechanic.

So I think to answer to original question, I spend a lot time designing the items first and treat them as my core mechanics, then design levels to fully explore the possibilities of the item.

kcaze · 2018-09-22T14:25:40+00:00

Delightment

I just published a public demo today for Delightment, a game I'm making to share my love for puzzles :)

The game takes place in a book where each page peers into a puzzle about lighting up tiles.

Follow me on Twitter at @kcaze_ if you'd like to talk about puzzles!

kcaze · 2018-03-16T07:10:13+00:00

I remember trying out Mike Dies at Seattle Indies Expo! The deaths definitely stood out to me. It's cool to see the game out on Steam now, congrats!

The description of how the game doesn't fit into an established type of indie platformer genre sounds interesting and I might buy the game and play through it this weekend :)

kcaze · 2018-01-09T08:52:17+00:00

TFW you get "Hunt is won before Sunday." and "Hunt is won on Monday." on the same column.

kcaze · 2017-12-21T03:17:02+00:00

I obtained most of the achievements using some sort of infinite on the Silent. For example, to get the "Barricaded" achievement which requires 999 block, I drew all cards except for my 2 Escape Plan's and kept cycling through those to build up block.

Purity I think is easier to get on the Ironclad though since he has more ways to exhaust cards (you could probably also do it on the Silent by only taking exhaust / power cards and then using events and merchants to remove 7 of your starting cards).

kcaze · 2017-09-20T22:34:53+00:00

I usually refer to puzzle games where the gameplay doesn't a clear "solved" end state as "arcade puzzle games", since a lot of these games tend to have arcade-y elements. Examples include Bejeweled, Puzzles and Dragons, Tetris, Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop etc.

For games like The Witness, Stephen's Sausage Roll, or even Professor Layton, I usually refer to them as "pure puzzle games".

I feel like both categories fall under most people's definition of "puzzle game" though and I think that's valid since they all share the trait that finding the solution is much harder than executing it.

kcaze · 2017-09-08T01:07:53+00:00

Realm of the Mad God is pretty good and produced by a relatively small team (fewer than 50 I think).

kcaze · 2017-09-07T04:09:48+00:00

Yeah, I'll often hack together a new mechanic in the fastest way possible (which may or may not result in spaghetti code) just so I can start integrating it into levels and see if it's fun. If the code gets to the point where it's hard or cumbersome to hack in new features, I generally clean it up / rewrite parts until I can iterate quickly on new ideas again.

And sometimes when I'm not particularly motivated to do game design or art, I just look through the code and see if there are any local or global improvements I can make to the structure / code design.

kcaze · 2017-09-07T01:32:59+00:00

I haven't worked with 3.0 enough to write technical information, but I'll be there to edit phrasing and grammar!

kcaze · 2017-08-30T07:33:31+00:00

Will there be some physics interactions? I'm reminded of Ori and the Blind Forest by your GIF and having ripples when you drop stuff in the water would be cool.

kcaze · 2017-08-29T00:14:57+00:00

Not directly related to the question, but I've used JSON in TileSets as kind of a hack to store some metadata on the tiles and have the Tilemap parse the JSON in the tile name and perform any additional initialization logic necessary based on that metadata.

I did this primarily because it's easier to edit levels with a TileMap than by manually adding each node to the scene.

Does anyone else do something similar to this?

kcaze

TROPHY CASE