Here's how Box Voyage has evolved over time. The images at the top of the page are from earlier in development.
If you're interested in playing the demo version of the game, feel free to find it on Itch.io. We're officially on Steam as well, so make sure to add Box Voyage to your wish list! |
Now we'll take a look at how things are now. Once we built out the 8 rooms we settled on, there wasn't much we changed other than a few balancing tweaks and edits to lay out. We'll describe big changes depending on what room we're in.
These are some shots from the Intro/Tutorial section of our game. Originally the button on the panel on the left had a "set sail" plaque under it, but players thought the plaque was the button and would get confused frequently. On the right we used to have a text blurb that told the player about our fun mechanic but that was kinda boring and the switch was exposed so players frequently accidentally skipped past it and didn't get the core game loop as there's no way to return to this point once you get by it. We opted to add in an FMV to explain things to the player and added ways to skip it on a second or third play through. That FMV is something like Mitch's fourth or fifth take after a few days of attempts and we all crack up when it starts up.
Once you complete the intro you get here, to the Reception and this is the first point where the player is really let loose. In this room we wanted to show off all of our main interactions as well as include some hidden things like a trophy. There are still a couple tweaks on the backlog for this room for quality of life but those will end up in the game if we do some touching up in the future.
This is a screen-cap of the map and tips list. The map reflects the layout of the ship which shows off that, while this is on a cube, it technically has an extra side - ooooo, non-euclidean geometry, ooooo - and lets the players get an idea of the layout before they start moving around. The travel tips were added pretty late in development. Thanks to some work done by the faculty, we were lucky enough to get to chat with some developers from Rockstar Games and get some feedback on how things were going. We pretty quickly implemented the suggestions they had that fit in our scope and it has taken care of a lot of our issues that we were experiencing.
At this point in the game the player can kind of go anywhere. The rooms from here on out are just done in a pretty random order.
Here's the Gift Shop! This room is now just about collecting one of every item, but it used to be a math puzzle where the player had to get the right amount of money in the basket but that just slogged play time really hard. We made the tweak and did some adjusting to make the game a bit less of a grind in this room.
Get a haircut at the Salon! This room looks a lot different from our original idea and has also gone through some changes. Initially this room used to have randomly generated styles up in the top corner. We ran into some issues where the code would occasionally select identical looks in sequence and would make it so the player could finish the room in a really quick way. We opted to go with 3 pregenerated solutions that showcased each of the mechanics. Unfortunately that means that some of the assets aren't used, but it's still something the player can mess with.
What's that falling from the sky? On the front deck we've got a quick puzzle and mostly non-productive elements the player can mess with but completing the room is still important as it's one of the first gates in the game.
Once you get to the Restaurant you can serve up some dishes. Not sure how this abides by health code standards but this room takes some heavy inspiration from sliding puzzles and those water jet toys from when we were kids. This room has had a few adjustments in terms of where things were exactly positioned to make things feel right.
Here's a look at the Arcade. This room has to be one of the hardest trophies to collect. The gravity hills machine is brutal and will really effectively show you if you've got joystick drift. There aren't actually many devs who have completed the gravity hills machine.
This is the Control Room and without giving too much away the wheel to control the ship has gone through a lot of designs before we "landed" here. In this room the player gets to meet a new friend!
Here's a pulled back shot of the desk to kinda get a feel for where things are and scale. Seeing this much marks the end of the end of the player's experience and marks when they've got to get back to work!