• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

SCALE - Grow and shrink anything, explore worlds, solve puzzles

Skyzard

Banned
Not So Grand Canyon
ib2K3jD9PuraJq.gif

So you can shrink the whole world to make walking about easier? Or is that some sort of special object for the grand canyon?

Very interesting game mechanic.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
So you can shrink the whole world to make walking about easier? Or is that some sort of special object for the grand canyon?

Very interesting game mechanic.

if you look at the gun it tells you when an object is shrinkable/growable, so that would be a custom level I believe. Makes sense, because allowing the user to change any bit of geometry in a level could get real messy from a design point of view.

Also, I looked and couldn't find an estimated release date on the KS. Anyone see it?

edit: nvm, found it. estimated delivery december 2014
 
if you look at the gun it tells you when an object is shrinkable/growable, so that would be a custom level I believe. Makes sense, because allowing the user to change any bit of geometry in a level could get real messy from a design point of view.

Also, I looked and couldn't find an estimated release date on the KS. Anyone see it?

edit: nvm, found it. estimated delivery december 2014
According to the dev, each level will have a unique twist on the scaling mechanic as you progress. So in that level, you can grow and shrink the world as a whole
 

GraveHorizon

poop meter feature creep
Backed $15, because why the fuc* not. Better be plenty of asses I can jump out of. Or maybe a mirror, and you can scale yourself into space.
 
Long time, no see. I guess if I forgot about a game, most everyone probably did too.

But yeah game is still in development. Dev had some interesting updates recently

This update describes the puzzle possibilities and design
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1188957169/scale/posts/1597700
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1188957169/scale/posts/1585075
How to make a SCALE Level:

Choose an Idea

1. Generate a bunch of interesting ideas (I always have way more ideas that I can ever possibly implement)

2. Choose an idea

3. Check this idea against the Idea Gauntlet - A series of questions I designed to help focus my work. For example: What is the insight? Can this puzzle only exist in SCALE? What is the purest form of this idea? What mechanics and elements does this idea include? How does it group conceptually with other ideas in the game?
The player is presented with a tiny house that can be carried, rotated, and manipulated. It can be scaled up large enough to enter. Once inside, it can be scaled much larger still (allowing entry into small nooks and crannies.) It can have objects inside it, including other houses.

The player runs through the front door of a house into the front door of another house into the front door of another house. Matryoshka houses. There are a series of timed switches the player must hit quickly; only by arranging the houses one inside the next can they make it through quickly enough. Or the reverse, have to start inside the smallest house and run out, scaling down each subsequent house to reach the timed switch quickly enough.
One interesting thing I noticed early in development was that scaling objects freely allows the player to bend time as well as space. If you can freely scale objects and environments, you can quickly traverse huge distances by making small adjustments to where you’re standing on a scaling object. For example, if you’re standing on a gigantic island you could walk for 10 minutes and still not make it all the way across. But if you can scale the island down so that it's the size of a hopscotch square you can take one step and be on the other side. I made a version of this idea with an actual island. That one’s lost to time, but you get the gist.

And a cool example of something like that

QlQe4W0.gif


Here are screenshots from this year and last

 
Huh, reminds me of that forced perspective puzzle game

This looks pretty cool too though, definitely down for it whenever it comes out
Funnily enough, about that
When I moved back to California, I moved within driving distance of a bunch of friends. Some of these friends are working on similar, crazy games. Together we’ve formed what we’re calling The Impossible Club. That is, a bunch of us crazy nuts making games based on impossible geometry. The members include Hanford Lemoore (Maquette), Albert Shih (Museum of Simulation Technology), and Andrew Coggeshall (who also works on SCALE but has his own amazing first person lateral thinking puzzle game called Red Frame). Sometimes Willy Chyr (Manifold Garden) stops by virtually!
 
Maybe it's just me and hand models in firstperson games, but I would love to see Penny's hands to give more personality. Anyway, still looking pretty cool. I bet my architect friend would be interested.
 
Scale is now two years overdue :/ He really needs to nail down a timetable and stick to it.
Those Kickstarter "release dates" when a campaign launches are basically meaningless once any stretch goals are achieved, among many other factors. They are release timeframes given when the game is in pre-alpha/alpha. It's like asking a writer when the book is arriving in stores while he's still doing the first chapter draft.

The game has gone through graphical changes (and an engine upgrade to Unity 5, I believe?), not to mention the inherent difficulty in making varied puzzles based on such a specific mechanic while also figuring out how to teach the player how the mechanics work, while also figuring out how to string them together in levels, how to best design levels and hubs, and so on

Four, five years for this game is perfectly reasonable
 

mreddie

Member
Not shocked, Shantae had a kickstarter back in Summer 2013 and was just released last month. These games, especially small teams take time.

After MN9, quality matters.
 
Not shocked, Shantae had a kickstarter back in Summer 2013 and was just released last month. These games, especially small teams take time.

After MN9, quality matters.
Plus this game has more factors than usual given the unusual nature and physics of scaling mechanic.

For example, in the recent video, there was a part where you need to place a block on a switch, but due to world scaling, the block becomes too light to activate the switch when you shrink the world down. Thus the switch unintentionally becomes deactivated. That was something he said was working on figuring out
 

Dwayne

Member
I'm less worried about missing the deadline than not actually having deadlines. It's healthy for a project to have milestones and deadlines to work towards, otherwise you risk running out of budget and never launching. I really hope at this point he's got a schedule nailed down, and just hasn't exposed it to the public yet for whatever reason.
 

Alastor3

Member
The game look awesome and I think it's a small team? So im sure it's going to be great!! I saw a couple of video back in the day and it was awesome
 
Top Bottom