I’ll be the first one to admit we’re not the most savvy at marketing and social media. We prefer putting our heads down and working on the game to self promoting. Which is really one of our downfalls as any dev will tell you that marketing yourself is key to success.
One of the problems I have is recognizing what is noteworthy, I tend to agonize over every tweet and post on whether they’re good enough to post or not.
As we’ve had more people play Lumote, we’ve discovered that our puzzles were forcing players into committing suicide in order to progress. The nature of Lumote’s open-air level design means that it’s easy to lose a moving piece and puzzles are only reset to a solvable state upon death. However, forcing the player to kill themselves to reset a puzzle quickly leads to a sense of helplessness and frustration, which is what we want to avoid.
So I know I promised a part 2 for Modularizing Lumote. However, we’ve been extremely busy putting together a video and demo build of Lumote to submit to the Indie MEGABOOTH for Pax Prime in September. With that now out of the way, we though it would be fun to share the video part of the submission with you.
Wish us luck!
When we initially set out to take our UE4 game jam entry Bump and extend it out to be Lumote, we knew we wanted to make it one giant map. The game is extremely dark and as you progress you illuminate the world. Because of this, we wanted to not only give you some larger sense of progress, but also offer some nice vistas to show where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished along the way.
After letting the public loose on Lumote at Full Indie, one of the main things we knew we needed to fix right away was the way we visually communicate actions to the player. We had put this off thinking that we had other higher priorities, but watching people play proved to us that this was wrong. Our core game loop is; explore, discover, possess and we were failing on all accounts to make this a natural and interesting experience for players.
