Indagatrix--Flash in Flash Entry

When I saw the announcement for the Flash in a Flash contest, I thought, "hey, that looks like fun, it would give me a reason to actually finish something." So, I resurrected an old concept I had toyed with earlier and completely rebuilt it from scratch. Here's the description I put on the submission form:

Indagatrix

The player takes on the role of a robot who has awoken to find herself in a vast machine designed to test the abilities of automated agents. As the robot progresses, she begins to discover the story behind the machine, and herself. Each test consists of maze, but with a twist: sections of the maze must be built upon in order to complete. The player must decide the most logical way to use the pieces available to them in order to pick up points, and acquire the pieces necessary to finish the maze.






Click here to play

Feedback would be great, because in the future I hope to expand this into a larger game.

 

*shameless bump*

 

Sounds cool..

 

I really liked the gameplay idea, though as of now the controls are quite clunky, and when placing objects it's sometimes difficult to click the cubes (I suppose because they're obstructed by other invisible elements). Anyway, again, really nice concept, and with some work and a better interface (and more polished graphics) I think it would be serious fun

 

I really like this idea! I tried the demo and I think it's got excellent potential. The overall atmosphere is cool, and I believe the game play could be a lot of fun for the puzzle genre. Put a story with it and I think it could go places. Here are some observations:

- I found the scene overall to be somewhat too dark.
- The meaning of the symbols on the minimap were not obvious to me.
- The menu for selecting a piece to insert can get lost in the background. When I first clicked on a blue wireframe I didn't realize a menu had appeared with pieces I needed to select from.
- I found I wanted a lower camera angle at times, to see further ahead. Perhaps the angle could be ajustable through a small range?
- If I use my pieces up and get stuck, am I expected to press "Reset"?

Cool concept, good implementation. Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Mal

 

Since I whipped this out in about two weeks, if I were to continue work on it I would probably completely redo things graphically. And as for the interface...from a back-end perspective, it needs to go die in a hole. It's a weird combo of plane meshes and a hack GUIskin I threw together. That makes it really odd (not really difficult, just odd) to work with. One thing the windows really need are some sort of background too.

I'm also thinking about adding a first person view in addition to the the third person view. The reason I didn't add this before was because the models/textures weren't high res enough for that type of view, but since I'm no longer going to be targeting flash, this won't be an issue anymore.




P.S.
Did anyone find the journals? There is a (small) backstory you can uncover (there is at least 1 journal in each level, a couple have 2 I think).