I'm excited to have Camera Obscura featured in this week's Indie Royale game bundle! Pay what you want for Camera Obscura and 5 other games. No reason not to pick it up now!
It's happening. Three years after its inception, Camera Obscura has made it through Steam Greenlight. We've been hard at work through January getting everything ready for release, and it's coming on February 19th. I'm excited to finally get the game out to players so they can enjoy it!
For more information, visit cameraobscuragame.com.
It's always fun to see people building computer-like circuits in games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. While it's outlandishly impractical to build computers in computers, it's just so much fun and so educational. Well, today I figured out how to do it in the Camera Obscura engine using moving platforms and I was irrationally excited about it, so I built a four-bit adder circuit. It adds two four-bit numbers together and show the results. Check it out:
You can download the level here.
Boring details on how this works: there are several very small sets of logic gates, the basic building blocks of electronic chips, that can be provably used to create every other possible logic gate (trivia: NAND gates alone are sufficient, as are NOR gates). Camera Obscura's mechanics are capable of creating two gates: OR, by simply linking multiple sources to the same moving platform, and NOT (at least as far as I've discovered). Fortunately these two gates together are sufficient. Information can propagate through the system because moving platforms can press buttons that trigger other platforms...and so forth.
This possibility also provides some pseudo-scripting functionality to game levels. Imagine a passcode-protected vault that only opens when you enter the right number, or even a game of Mastermind within the level.
This week marks the first public release of a playable demo for Camera Obscura! The released demo contains 20 levels out of the 100 total in the full game. We have also included the full level editor, so you can make and share custom levels without limit.
We are very excited to be at this stage where we can finally begin to get solid feedback from people based on how the game actually plays. Please download it and let us know what you think, and remember to support us on Greenlight!
Download
Demo Installer (Recommended)
Demo ZIP
The process of releasing a demo was a surprisingly lengthy one. I always thought I would just compile a release build, stick a readme file in it, and send it out to the internet. As it turned out, however, there were numerous aspects of the game that had to be examined and tweaked to make sure publication went (and continues to go) smoothly. In addition to the normal, everyday tasks of polishing features and tackling bugs, I had to consider what parts of the user's saves needed to be kept for future versions of the game (like their options and achievements) and which parts would need to be thrown out later, and build in a mechanism for allowing that. I also had to build an installer to ensure the users would have all the right dependencies (runtime dependencies can suck). And, of course, we had to test the heck out of every other aspect of the game, as well. The thought of someone putting aside the game because it crashed on the menu screen is not a nice one. So there's my semi-educational post-mortem thing for publishing a demo.
Camera Obscura has been submitted to Steam Greenlight as of this Sunday! We've very excited to have a shot at publishing the game as we approach 2 years of development. Visit Greenlight here and vote for us:
Camera Obscura \ Steam Greenlight
We've also released a portion of the soundtrack on Youtube for your enjoyment:
