Author: David

I am not known for being consistent with my blog updates. Or maybe posting once every 2 years is consistency.

Anyway. Just wanted to let you know that L5 is in the works, and it has been for a couple of months. It is far from done, but it is going great. The puzzle density, the amount of puzzles per room is much higher than before. I hope this is something players will enjoy. The rooms are a bit more independent this time, meaning that there is not as much backtracking as in previous titles.

If I’m lucky I will have the game done this year, but I usually miss my deadlines so don’t take that too seriously.

Here’s a tiny teaser showing how one of the rooms (currently in development) went from sketch to something a bit more real.




David

PS. The comments are not working properly here, if you want to get in touch, send me an email to nosignalproductionsinc@gmail.com

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Hi,
it might only be web crawlers reading this but in that case I say hi to you too spider.
Just wanted to let anyone who is interested to know that I’m still around and currently working on Legacy 4. It doesn’t have a full title name yet, but I promise it will be just as generic as the others I’ve created.

The reason L4 has taken so long is because I went on a small game-development detour. After L3 I was quite done with puzzle-games mentally and I was certain that the Legacy-series had come to an end. Therefore I decided to make a PC game instead. It was fantastic, the joy of making games was back and I actually felt creative again. Something I didn’t do at the end of finishing L3.

The game was a homage to an old favorite of mine, the Heroes of Might and Magic series I played as a kid.

It was a very different experience from making Legacy.

In Legacy I usually create all mechanics very early in development. By mechanics I mean player movement, dragging and rotating objects, inventory management, click-interactions with objects and other. When they are in place I start to populate the world with rooms and puzzles. Sometimes I have puzzles sketched out already and sometimes the room “shows” me something can be done (the infamous drop-the-rock over the edge in L1 was created this way). This process can be fun but also very tedious. It’s not particularly difficult as soon as I’ve figured out what the puzzle looks like. 3d-modeling and then some scripting that usually involves something basic as rotation of a door or interaction-listening. Anyone who has played my games knows that I don’t put much effort into my 3d-modeling. The reason is because I’ve always found it to be a bit boring.

When making the PC-game everything changed. I suddenly enjoyed every single step of development. The programming was extremely challenging, the visuals was not related to 3d-modeling at all making it very fun to work with. The mechanics of the games were not defined from the start so the game grew organically (by adding water -> I had to add boats -> I had to add -> boat management -> boat AI -> boat rules). This felt fantastic! The game was growing by itself and it was more that I “discovered” the game than I created it sometimes. Here are a lot of snapshots from development taken at random times.

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This became a huge problem after some time. By not saying no to new features the size of the project became so big that at the end I worked more with maintaining it than creating it. Had I had a different programming background this could have been somewhat avoided. Historically I’ve programmed as I go without a seriously thought out plan before starting. This has worked fine for Legacy games but for more advanced games this is a terrible, terrible approach. The first half of the PC game was made like this. The other half was re-writing scripts and trying to actually think before coding. My coding became many times better from this process.

So the coding was doing alright but I still said yes to new features on a daily basis. A bit exaggerated but that’s how it felt sometimes.

Of course the game should have wear on the weapons and armor! How can I say no to that? Coding the wear didn’t take long, but getting the visuals right took many many hours. The yes-saying David should have been firing a long time ago. Instead of getting closer to releasing the game I somehow managed to get farther away from it every day.

The morale of the company started to deteriorate and the joy of development suffered. I still had many great days but the size of the game and not being able to see the end of it became this black hole that sucked more and more energy from me.

After thinking about it for a year I eventually put the game on hold. Yes, a year. I’m that stupid.

That was last November (2021). I immediately started to work on the L1-remake. Took me 1-2 months to release it and the reception was great. It was strange, because I actually enjoyed making it even though it wasn’t very challenging. I knew all the puzzles and the modeling wasn’t hard when I already knew the layout of the rooms. I guess it was making a game where I could see the finish line.

So after that I took a small break and then development on Legacy 4 started earlier this spring. I hope to have it done before December this year. I am enjoying working with it.

Here are some pictures from development, also taken at random times and at random things.

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I might write more about the pc game, or L4 later.

If you want to let me know something send me an email:

nosignalproductionsinc [at] gmail [dot] com

The comments on these blog posts are somewhat broken and I might miss it if you write it here.

Take care,
David

So several players have told me they’ve lost their amulet in the green corridor.
If this happens to you, it’s most likely not a bug. Go to room 14 and look at the “laser table” to the left. It will most likely be resting there.
If this happens to you in the 4th corridor, it might be resting on the “laser table” in room 23, also on the left.

Hope it helps!
David

So I’ve just uploaded the game to Apple and it is officially done. It will be released next friday 18th on the App Store.
Sorry for letting Apple-users wait a bit too long but there wasn’t enough time for me to get the game done in time before christmas.

 

 

Hope you will like the game,
David

So the launch date for Legacy 3  – [Title unkown] was first set to September. And guess what – it’s September but no Legacy 3 to be seen in the stores.
I was really trying to get it done by now and when I first wrote the script it really felt like I would be able to make it. However the game has grown during the development and there is no chance of me releasing the game in September. More likely is November if everything goes according to plan.
I’m so sorry for this but I want to release a game that feels worth the money so by delaying it hopefully the quality of the game improves.

As an apology I provide some screenshots from the game, hope you like them 🙂
PS. The screenshots are all from an early stage in development and all of them will change in some way before release.

PS.2. Spoiler warning.
David

So I haven’t been very active here lately, or not active at all actually. I’m not really sure yet of how much I’m going to use the blog but I will try to update once in a while.

Since about 1-2 months ago I’ve been thinking about my next game, another game in the Legacy series. This one takes place before the first game, Legacy – The Lost Pyramid (that will recieve a facelift after the next game btw). Instead of playing as Mira you are now playing as Harley, the brother who is missing in nr L1 and L2. I felt that there was a story to be told, and I hope you will like it. Not going to be much more specific about the story here, but focusing more on the game development itself.
Oh and also, I apologize for my english in this blog. I’m swedish and have never really got the hang of english grammar.

The last couple of days I’ve been working on the interactive system in L3. Interactive system for me means how the game interprets your finger on the screen and how that should be calculated into a movement of an object, or clicking a button. This system consists of atleast four big divisions:
– Moving the camera to look around
– Rotating an object by spinning it
– Rolling an object by dragging
– Sliding an object by dragging
Note: this is made up by me.
The difference between rotating and rolling an object is that in rolling you only move your finger over one axis whereas rotating is over two axis.

I just finish these four divisions, or atleast the first iteration. Usually there is a lot of tweaking needed after the beta testers try the game for the first time.
This system is a big upgrade from L2 (and an astronomical compared to L1), since the objects now can have physical properties attached to them, like weight, drag and momentum. The way I calculate how much to rotate the objects is also different from L2 with this system being much more precise. In L2 if you rotated an object it would follow your finger instantanleyusy…instantaniously…really? It would follow your finger very very super fast. This made the object feel weightless and hollow. It also came with an unwanted effect of snapping the object very quickly to an unwanted rotation. This is removed in L3, and it feels really good. I can write more about how that works in detail another day.

Another image of rotation and also dragging:

 

That’s it. My first real blog post. Maybe there will be more.

David

Hopefully I will write about the development of the next Legacy game here.
Atm I’m just trying to get this site to work properly.

David