Articles - Oizys

Hello World,

Do you know that feeling when you are first pitching your idea, holding your breath on those crucial seconds, anxiously analyzing every little signal... and you are so afraid the world might not like your "baby-project" as much as you do?

Well, we did just that a few days ago - and we are so happy to tell you that our project got greenlighted! (And, as you can probably tell, we are really excited about it :D) We will be working on it for the next few months, so you will also hear more often from us. So, without further ado...

We are glad to present to you: Oizys!

Oizys is a single-player, adventure, 3D puzzle-platformer currently being developed for PC. Being a conceptual approach to feelings of solitude and loneliness and how they affect your perception, you find yourself in a surreal, abstract, shapeshifting world, that strangely reflects your mood. The lighting, the colors, the character expression, the mechanics - everything in "Oizys" is affected by how you feel :)

In order to escape, you have to first understand why you are there while choosing carefully what and who to trust... And this will lead to the main (and hopefully surprising) plot twist in our narrative.

What's next?

Well, we are gonna start developing the level design & narrative, more concepts, some assets and developing some mechanics. To all of you game developers with experience in puzzles: What is something that you wish you had known in the beggining of your project/projects? Do you have some tips for us?

Stay tuned for all our DevBlogs, and don't forget to follow our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thank you so much for all your support and feedback :)

Ok, so good news first: We got a release date for our demo! Bad news? It's tomorrow and we're still working on it! *cries internally*

Of course we're joking - we're really happy that we're finally putting our baby project out there... But is it just us or the last days of a project always feel like they're the hardest? All the adjustments, the moments where you're just looking at the unreal screen, pressing ctrl+z followed by ctrl+y for full minutes... It almost feels like you're not making that much off a change.

But then we see this:

And we see it turn into this:

And that's the power of lighting and tweaking all the values. I mean... Do you know all those values in the post process, sky light, directional light, volumetric fog... Those that we usually don't mess with cause we're not entirely sure what they do? Well, we messed with almost all of those. And we got a result we're really proud of!

But back to the lighting. The most important part was the optimization of the lightmaps. There were places - like the vent you can see in the video, where we had to up the resolution to 2048 to make sure that perfect shadow was visible without too much pixelization. However, this made it incredibly hard to build the lighting in our indie-budget laptops. So we went around the map, mesh by mesh, lowering the lightmap resolution in other places, sometimes to values as low as 8 or 16... And it worked!

Another significant part of our level/environment design were the stars. We wanted the abyss to feel slightly inviting... And this meant figuring a way too have a really nice skysphere. The trick? We just went to the default sky material of Unreal - the M_Sky_Panning_Clouds - and changed the dot vector of the camera vector with (0,0,0) to just connect directly to the clamp a (1,1,1). And suddenly there were stars everywhere!

The moment where it all came together was definetely the fog (and we might have had quite the fun playing around with it...).

But let us know what do you think! And if you have a minute, we'd also be extremely grateful if you would take a few moments to just play our 0.1 version of the build, as somethings still need tweaking before the final launch and all opinions help! Here you can find the link to the questionnaire and downloadable build!

What's next?

... TOMORROW IS THE RELEASING DATE OF OUR VERTICAL SLICE/DEMO! Stay tuned for the link for the final demo file! :D

Have you read our last blog already? We've finally finished talking about our mechanics! If you missed it, you can check it out in World, Bottoms up! (Part I) and (Part II).

As game devs, we can all agree that mechanics are a fulcral part of every game. Such that in a brief manner, mechanic-wise, Oizys can be deconstructed as “Solve puzzles and collect memories by pushing, pulling, throwing and interacting with key objects”. But Oizys is more than that, right? Mechanics aren't even what we first pitch people about: we want them to focus on the story we want to tell.

While mechanincs might be enough in an dexterity focused game, by themselves, they aren't enough when you want to have a focus on narrative and on an story. And that left us with a challenge that - if you have been following us for long enought - you've heard us going on and on about how we weren't sure of the best way to tackle it.

How can we tie the challenge, the mechanics, the rational part of Oizys - to our story, our characters, the emotional part of this videogame?

Well, we've finally settled on something. While you need to use the different mechanics in order to solve the puzzles and progress through the map, the intermediate victory conditions are given by being able to collect the fundamental objects for the narrative. In turn, these allow you to further progress in the map (per example, being able to get a special memento key, that opens a closed door leading to another room).

But what about the puzzles?

Our mechanics are simple. Push & Pull Objects. Raise & Lower Platforms. Throw or Interact with Objects. So how could we turn them into something interesting and challenging? While keeping the focus on narrative? We found the key (pun somewhat intended) in layering and... Escape Rooms.

Escape Rooms can be challenging... But if they are so is because they require you to explore, to connect concepts and constantly flip between logical challenges, story based ones, and other that require experimentation and dexterity. That was exactly what we wanted for Oizys. So we thought about hiding a key in an stuffed animal of a rabbit in a tuxedo. Why? Because our main character's favorite book was Alice in the Wonderland. How would you know? Perhaps pay attention to the photographs where Alex and the rabbit seem to be inseparable. Or see how that book seems to be completely worn off in comparison to the others. Or... you know... brute force through the challenge and violently shake all the plushies. We all know that person...

But we had a deadline (same reason we weren't crazy enought to go and model rabbit plushies, sorry to all Alice fans who were getting their hopes up...) and couldn't get really expansive on the verbs although mechanics like "Interact" are really asking for it: Open, Turn on, Speak, Shake, Examine... The options would have been endless. But we couldn't do it and so we had to find another way. And that's when layering comes in!

As the player progresses through the map, challenges get progressively harder as they require more mechanics to be employed and more steps to solve a challenge. Perhaps in the first puzzle all you had to do was move a box. Soon enought you'll be having to move boxes, throw objects, raise platforms, come back down and interact just to progress a tad little bit more.

But here are some images and a video about what we mean!

In order to collect the collectible above the arc, the player needs to first move the box in order to see the hidden movable platform, and then position in such a way that it allows him to jump to the rock platform, and then to the top of the movable platform that he needs to raise to the optimum height.

In order to reach the house, the player needs to get out of the main path, as the house is unreachable through the front.

Elevator Puzzle - This is one of the puzzles inside the house, where after getting inside the elevator (by moving two objects, and throwing another one), the player needs to move a box and climb through the boxes, books, sofa and pillows, in order to get reach a pipe and then move towards an open vent. This is the last puzzle of our vertical slice.

What's next?

Well, we're two days away from the release of the vertical slice, so our next post will probably be about the finishing details. We'll be lauching a 0.1 version before the launch day, just to make sure there's no significant bugs we might have missed. Would you be interested in helping us out and try it? Lets us know!

In one of our previous articles (that you can find here) we've explained how due to our mechanics-based approach Oizys development process could be considered bottom-up. We've also explained our mechanics and subsequent verbs, and showed you how the process for our grab, push and pull and for our raise and lower of plataforms. Here's a quick recap:

Basically, we have 4 mechanics: the interact, the throw, the grab/push/pull and the raise & lower of platforms. We had some throw backs in regards to bugs in the throws and in the destructible meshes, and so we have only showed you so far the last two. So today, here's to our:

Interact

This mechanic works when the player is near a collectible object or the guide. It allows the player to see the interacted object closer, hear the memory associated with it, and lose or win the solitude points it has.

Throw and Breaking Objects

These were the harder to implement as our developer, David, ran into some issues with the destructible meshes of unreal and how hard it was to apply them to different objects. In the end, we ended up only having one type of breakable vase, in order to simplify it further, as we didn't have that much time to spend.

What's next?

As you can see in our last video about the destructible meshes and throw mechanic, we have already most of our animations implemented - and we'd love to tell you a little bit about that and how we used mocap for most of them. We're also approaching the release that of our vertical slice, so we'll be getting into some of the lighting and VFx soon!

We've asked you before on our Instagram...

We've also told you that the world in Oizys is affected by feelings and, more specifically, loneliness - that affects not only light, but also colors, mechanics & sound. We've ventured a bit in telling you exaclty how this worked in our last DevBlog - "Sound of Silence", but we've never really told you all about what in the end is one of the main features of Oizys. So, here's to:

Oizys Solitude System

So, to start of well, here's a quick graph of how it all plays out. Basically loneliness increases as time passes. The other way to affect loneliness is throught out the interaction with the collectibles and/or objectives. Objectives are always positive memories, and collectibles can be negative or positive. This means that objectives always significantly lower loneliness, while collectibles can have a range of different impacts from positive and negative impact in the loneliness vvalue, respectively.

As seen above, loneliness affects four diferent game areas: mechanics, sound & music, sky color and post process of scene. In mechanics, it first deactivates the running mechanic, to then start decreasing velocity until it reaches 0 in maximimum Loneliness Level (LL). This meant to emulate how emotions can make you feel drained of energy and needing a sleep reset. When it comes to sound and music, the music goes through for states that blend seamlessly, and at as it approaches maximum LL, a hearbeat sound starts playing faster and louder. This is meant to make the player feel progressively more stressed, sad and overwhelmed, and at the final LL mimick a panic attack. This plays together with the post process parameter, as at that point scene saturation starts decreasing, and screen corners start appearind darkened. Throughout the game, from minimum to maximum LL both the sky color and the color temperature of the overall scene, change, portraing colder tones as solitude increases.

Below, you can see all of this in action, as well as how collectibles and goals can affect the loneliness meter.

What's next?

We still got some mechanics left to show you and our artist has been working hard on more environment assets, so we might be showing you some of that soon!