Events
GDC in March is well behind us and I had a great time there. Among other things, I got to show off Eye of the Temple at the European Game Showcase (and saw a lot of other cool games too). This was a private event for specially invited people from the network of the organizers.Now, Eye of the Temple has been selected for Yonderplay, an event that's part of the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö in Sweden and open to everyone at the conference. This will go down on May 25, the last day of the conference. This is the most public showing of the game yet, and I'm very excited about it! If you'll be at Nordic Game Conference yourself, come by and say hi and give the game a try.
Mixed reality
At GDC I also met some of the fine people from LIV, a platform for mixed reality recording (and more) for VR content. I've been integrating support for LIV in Eye of the Temple (it's very easy) and a handful of people from their community has been helping me test the game both with focus on mixed reality and in general.Apart from testing and feedback, I've also been allowed to create and use some gifs from their recordings. Being able to show Eye of the Temple in mixed reality is very exciting to me, since it shows the physical nature of stepping around in the game in a way that's been impossible with regular purely virtual footage. Here's a few examples:
These gifs are featuring ThreeDee from ComedyPipe. I tweeted them here and here.I would love to have mixed reality gifs with others playing the game as well. If you have Vive or Oculus Rift with a mixed reality setup and is up for it, please get in touch!
Discord server
For a long time I've been using itch's forum feature to talk with early testers of the game, but I'm now beginning to move more towards Discord. I've only just learned about Discord recently, but have been happy with it so far. Feel free to join!
Here's an invite link to the Eye of the Temple Discord server
Pots
Last but not least, I just implemented a new feature in the game: Pots!Pots contain gems. You can tap the pots gently to get the gems out a few at a time or just smash the pots with your whip or torch to get all the gems all at once. But that would be a shame for such antique and rare pottery, now wouldn't it?
The pots give players more opportunities to use the whip, which I think was much needed. They also add more physicality to the game, since the pots (and the shards if they're smashed) are physics-driven objects. Hopefully it also adds just a bit of player expressiveness potential and unpredictability to the game.
A player can intentionally smash a pot, or intend to just brush it softly with the whip to tease out gems in a non-destructive way. This can however still accidentally make it topple over and fall down and get smashed way below. Players could set goals for themselves to smash all pots or avoid smashing any. Whether this will happen in practice is yet to be seen but it at least feels nice to me to allow for different approaches like this.
I made this silly and crudely acted video showcasing the new pots. Do you enjoy pottery too? Let me know in the comments!
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