Oil, a 2D top-down puzzle game

ivarhill

Here's a personal Unity project I've been working on for a few weeks - everything except the base Unity frameworks is made by me including design, coding etc. (and an original soundtrack!)

Some prototype screenshots below:











Would love some feedback on the general art direction - as I'm sure you can see the art is based off real photo references manipulated to keep a coherent style.

paco

I'm not an artist, but as a gamer and developer I think it looks really good!

I know that doesn't really help you improve it, but hopefully it will help you keep going. If you are looking for a beta tester pm me.

ivarhill

Thanks!

It's really made as a portfolio piece rather than a game for the market, so beta testing may not be as relevant. I do aim to make it into a complete game however!

SiSweetman

Hey man, overall I think your work is strong for what you're going for. What's really important with games is to make sure that clarity is paramount. There are two things present in your work that reduce clarity. Firstly is value, as in dark and light value. Convert any of your images into grey scale. I'm relatively certain you'll find that most of your values fall in the mid-tone range, with small pockets of high value. Obviously this isn't an illustration and so image composition is not the main way you're reading the image, but giving a greater range of low, mid and high value will give the image a better overall read, especially in terms of giving objects in your world depth and weight. In spite of your clear light sources there are no drop shadows anywhere. Certainly objects are going to need to move around and to create dynamic lighting on those is a challenge, but for static objects, creating drop shadows will go a long way to giving height to an otherwise flat surface.

The second issue with clarity, as I see it, is a byproduct of the former issue, which is object importance/relevance. What things in the frame are you able to interact with, what is important to the game and what is ambient. In order to make gameplay flow well, it's important to give some visual cues that object 'x' may be more relevant to playing the game than ambient object 'y'. This is without me having any knowledge of the mechanics or anything, so perhaps I'm a little off base, but it is something to consider.

I hope that helps. Cheers.

ivarhill

Thanks for the feedback! These are great points and I'll take them into consideration. I think in this case I don't mind the player having a bit of a harder time finding what to interact with since that's part of the gameplay here, much is simply exploring and discovering what can be done around the environments. I'm definitely going a bit old-school on this one and favor excessive pixel-hunting over excessive handholding, but of course one should strive for a middle ground here.

Some progress - readable notes scattered around the levels:


More complex puzzles:


Complete with clues to find: