PuzzleBloom

We are proud to announce the official launch of PuzzleBloom at

http://puzzlebloom.com

The back-cover description:

Puzzle Bloom is an innovative action-puzzle game where you control the tree spirit Canotila in her quest to bring back life to her island.

Canotila needs assistance of the island’s native creatures to get through the industrialised world. She flies from creature to creature and uses her powers to guide them. New life will bloom into the world for each time Canotila breaks a machine, bringing her closer to the ultimate goal of return to nature.

No download needed: Solve puzzles in a full 3D environment that runs directly in your browser.
Bend the static rules of traditional puzzle games by switching control over creatures.
Enjoy the beautiful graphics of Canotila’s rise of nature.

Yeah, just play and have fun Oh, and third level is coming soon.

The game was made in one month during a http://www.dadiu.dk production. All the other games during that production were made in Unity as well, so remember to check them out. I kinda got the ball rolling and made everyone switch from Source to Unity, yeah

 

Looks good, but I can't right click (on a Mac, CTRL-click), so I can't get passed the instructions. Any hints?

 

when it said puzzle game i thought it was going to be some 2d simple game but this game is awesome. i beat the island on the right side in the begining menu. great game. I like the art style too.

 

Ehh, those weird input devices Quick fix is already there - Unity is not registering ctrl-click as right click, which is an unpleasant gotcha.

 

Great work. Nice graphics and game idea

 

Played it on Mac and PC. Looks great on PC. On Mac some of the textures (like the creatures the fairy rides), don't show up and the the creatures are just black.

 

Midna? hehe

Very nice presentation and fun gameplay.

I feel bad when the guys die from lasers
Maybe just have them run away when they get hit by lasers and not die.

 

This is so cool!

The game is really polished - both technically and gameplay-wise.

I would love to read about how you did the transformation from stone and metal to green landscapes - because I can't figure out how you did it, it it works really well.

Rune

 

Agreed, well done game.

I think that the grass transition is some kind of post-processing image effect, like a camera mask. Could be wrong though...

 

Great game! Good graphics, good control, unique concept.... I love it.

 

Hey guys,
we are so glad that you like it

Well, as for every technical challenge in our game the solution was - a shader

In short - we get 3 textures in:
wasteland, greenland and noise.
Depending on the distance from the initial point we either use the color from the wasteland or the greenland texture. In each frame the values from consecutive rows of the tiled noise texture are used to make the border look as if the green stuff creeps out.

But there's more to it - also the grass shows up gradually. I need to make the camera for the second checkpoint to show that pretty grass off...

Robert was making those shaders so you can poke him for more info.

If you want to get updates as soon as we put new levels in, you can sign up for the newsletter on the website.

Have a great weekend. For us it's finally time to enjoy the spring.
And work on the third level. And work on our master thesis... right Robert, right? ;>

Kuba

 

Amazing game!
Beautiful gfx, relaxing gameplay, runs pretty smooth...
Congrats.

 

great work!!!

 

Awesome work, I really enjoyed it, aswell as the other entries.
I always wanted to study at DADIU, I even called around to see which educations get access to DADIU.
Great work, I'm sure you're all going to do great.

 

Awesome. Simply awesome. Smooth gameplay, simple controls and amazing graphics. Very impressive guys!

 

Great job. My kids and I played through to the end and found it to be quite a surprise!

 

I'm not so sure about having the initial load and then be on the title screen and having to load again without some notification. I clicked New Game a few times and I received no feedback as to why nothing was happening. I saw the bars and understood that's what was going on but some people might not.

 

We totally agree. We'll probably flash the progress bar in red colour when you hit start before it loaded fully. Perhaps progress bars should be moved next to the start button (progress bar for level1) and choose checkpoint (cumulative progress bar for all levels)... we'll test that.
Also there are more animations for the avatar on the way, so she will entertain you while waiting

 

By the way, why does level 1 and 2 load simultaneously? Surely level 1 would load faster if level 2 is not loaded at the same time?

Unless there is some logic behind the current loading, I would just make a single progress bar that shows the loading of the current level (1 when at the start screen) and then begin loading level 2 in the background while level 1 is being played.

Rune

 

Actually the levels are being downloaded one after the other (main menu, level1, level2), but Application.GetStreamProgressForLevel() takes into account also decompression. If you also take into account the fact, the level2 is four times smaller than level1, since it reuses most of the assets, you get the effect we're seeing in the main menu, that the levels appear to be loading almost simultaneously.

Since (afaik) there is no runtime control over when and which levels are loaded in the streamed web player, we would have to use the WWW class - but then again: why would we? Web player is streaming levels in the predefined sequence as fast as it can and that's what we want.

I also think we should be showing a separate progress bar for each level, like we are now. The reason is that when you select the 'choose checkpoint' option, you should have info why can you play level1 but not level2 if level2 is still loading.

Of course we could organise it differently (e.g. show one progress bar by 'start game' and a progress bar for each level after selecting 'choose checkpoint'), but I assure you - during one month production we had bigger concerns than progress bars

Speaking of which - if you guys are interested in how I made the wasteland->greenland transition effect, I can extract it to an example project and post it here.

And thanks for all the great comments - if you're having fun playing the game, then all the sleepless nights were not in vain.

 

Ah, ok.
You might consider though, once you have 10 levels or more (hopefully), if the user selects level 10 it will be very annoying having to wait for levels 1 to 9 to load first.

I understand. If it was me, I would simply only display a progress bar after the user has already selected a level (or "new game", which is like selecting level 1). This has two advantages in my opinion:
1) The user gets immediate feedback on level select (oh, it's loading the level I selected) rather than being confused that the button doesn't do anything.
2) The user is not presented with more information than actually needed, which makes the interface cleaner and less confusing.

That would be highly appreciated!

Definitely not in vain! I hope you get a lot of recognition with this game, so you can expand it further.

Rune

 

Sure, we see that problem. The downside of using the WWW approach would be that the levels couldn't be sharing assets, so that each given level would take a couple of times longer to download than it is now. Well, we could also script some asset management ourselves, but that looks painful even from a distance

You got a point there. We'll redesign the interface as soon as we'll get the other stuff out of the way.

Ok, will do

And thanks again.

 

really slow in my firefox browser and i have a fast connection speed

 

Thanks for all the great comments

Robert and Kuba have been amazing to work together with and have done a huge job to get where we are now with the game.

I am doing my thesis on intelligent camera control in games and will hopefully add some intelligent camera to the game to automatically move the camera to show new important puzzle elements instead of letting the player worrying about that.

 

Hi Puzzle Bloom Team,

Really great work you got there! We threw in a small blogpost about the DADIU games this year, mainly because you all chose to use Unity!

http://blogs.unity3d.com/

 

Awesome stuff, well done!

 

Truly amazing! One of the nicest games I've played.

Matt.

 

I'm in love with your game!!! It's beautiful!

Awesome work! I'm incapable of saying things about your game other than 'awesome', 'fantastic' and 'mega' !

 

Oh yes, once I'm done gushing about your fantastic game ... the wasteland->greenland transition effect is freaking brilliant. I was watching it thinking 'I have absolutely no idea how that's done'!! lol

Could you shed a little light on how you did this? It's a beautiful effect that adds a lot to the game. I honestly wouldn't know where to *start* programming something like that (I'd no doubt leave it to the 3d guys to figure out instead )

Thanks,

 

I'm preparing a nice little package for you guys as we speak, it will be available very soon

 

Sweeet!

Can't wait ... btw, what ARE you eating in that pic? Is it a candy fried egg?!

Thanks,

 

Love the Okami vibe during the "bloom" sequence

 

I've created a new thread on PuzzleBloom shaders (especially the transition effect :wink: ) to the ShaderLab forum at http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=145825

Have fun

And yes, this is a candy fried egg. Barcelona, Happy Pills - the best candy shop there is :wink:

 

How did I miss this thread? This is an amazingly well thought out and executed game. Such a pleasant departure from the "norm". Kudos on a job very well done!

 

PuzzleBloom just got featured in the Escapist Magazine.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/alt-escape/6360-Alt-Escape-PuzzleBloom

 

Thanks, Tempest.

PuzzleBloom became quite popular in the recent weeks due to having been selected for the PAX10 at Penny Arcade Expo (yay!) http://www.paxsite.com/pax10.php

Me and Kuba (the programmers), Jess (the game designer) and Daniel (the project manager) are going to PAX (4th-6th Sep in Seattle) to showcase PuzzleBloom, so if any of you guys will be there - come and say hi

We're also hoping to release level 3 by then and polish some rough edges, but it's the long-awaited vacation time for us now

 

really good,
just missing possibility to restart level.

 

+1 on the chorus of praise for puzzlebloom. Briliant game design and level design, great audio.

Like so many others in this thread, I was also scratching my head to figure out how you pulled the transition effect off. I'm looking forward to scrounging through the scripts you've published.

 

It's been awhile since PAX, but I just wanted to thank you guys for taking the time to talk to me about the engine and the game there. You really are swell, and I wish you all the best (and can't wait to play the new level/s!)

 

The site is unavailable

 

Hey Zaicheg,
we were aware of the problems with the website and it's all back online now.

 

really nice!

 

Hello, is this thread still alive?
I also asked this through an email since is been a lot of time you made the game...

I really like the concept of the game, but I wanted to ask how did you do the part of making the trees and vegetation around grow?

Which was your approach on making this effect? I also like Okami and I see a clear reference and I'm trying to achieve such effect and making it the most efficient posible and wanted to ask first about your approach.

Thanks!