There are still a few hours to go, but as of this morning our Kickstarter campaign is (exactly) 100% funded. But rather than bask in our own success, I'd like to take this time to draw attention to some other really worthy projects on Kickstarter. I know firsthand how important even $1 is for achieving success!
Hanafuda Cards:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sarahehthomas/modern-hanafuda
Oh, I remember many happy hours playing Kwa-Do with my sister using these cards. Is anyone outside of Japan familiar with these? Apparently at least one person is!
Exile Sun:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameknightgames/exile-sun-multiplayer-conflict-redefined
I played this board game at BGG.con in November. They already have super-professional-quality components, so I don't really know what they need investment for. But if you can just buy a game through this campaign, it's probably money worth spending.
Tunnelers:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gejmerqo/tunnelers-an-action-game-most-girls-won-t-understa?
Wow - this one looks really amazing. They've already spent 2 years on it, and it looks like a real-time mix of Moonbase commander and Scorched Earth. SO AWESOME.
Auro:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dinofarmgames/auro-the-golden-prince?
By the team that made 100 Rogues. That game wasn't especially compelling, but their new idea sounds stronger, and actually shipping an iOS game has GOT to increase your chops significantly.
The official blog for Sunstone Games. Check here for our artistic musings, press releases, community events, and game announcements.
Grouping Levels
It is customary for level-based games on mobile devices to have three levels to their level selection process: a main menu where players select "load a level", a chapter-select, and then a list of levels within that chapter. This is a classic way to present lots of content in a clean, accessible format.
Within Sun Stones we change things up a bit - we don't put players on a menu screen at all. In fact, most of our playtesters never enter any sort of menu, because we just let them flow between "glyph walls" and individual puzzles. We do have a menu system, and you can load individual levels through a more traditional 3-layer system, but our "no menu" alternative has been so strong that I sometimes wonder if we needed to bother.
What are Glyph Walls?
The metaphor behind playing Sun Stones is that you are using a cache of magical stones to create art on the rocky surface of a cave. You close your eyes and receive a vision, which remains represented in abstract form when you open them again. Using that abstract guide, you place stones on the surface. Once the stones exactly match your vision, the stones disappear and the final artistic glyph is inscribed onto the surface. That's one puzzle, or level of the game.
But these glyphs don't just exist in a vacuum - between individual puzzles you view a "Glyph Wall" which shows groups of glyphs - finished and unfinished. These Glyph Walls generally have 8 glyphs or so, grouped by thematic elements and arranged to tell a story. As players move through the game and solve their visions, they are simultaneously revealing the story each Glyph Wall tells. For example, our second story is "The Hunt." It begins with a campfire, arrowheads, and then a series of deer prints. The prints lead to a deer, then an arrow in flight appears. The final puzzle is the deer's hide drying over the fire which began the sequence.
Glyph Walls = Story = Mechanics
An exciting challenge for the team has been to not only select thematic glyphs for each wall, but to simultaneously teach new mechanics and new types of goals within each story. In the hunt, you are learning to transmute orange sun stones into obsidian stones - a transformation which first happens with the fire and the arrowhead. Later we use Weaving as a metaphor to teach players how rows of black stones are transmuted into white stones, and so forth.
It has been an ongoing challenge to simultaneously develop our mechanics, aesthetics, and level progression. Various attempts by the team to separate these elements have resulted in some less-than-compelling experiences, so we've continued down this demanding path. I hope players enjoy the efforts we've put into making those relationships so seamless.
Within Sun Stones we change things up a bit - we don't put players on a menu screen at all. In fact, most of our playtesters never enter any sort of menu, because we just let them flow between "glyph walls" and individual puzzles. We do have a menu system, and you can load individual levels through a more traditional 3-layer system, but our "no menu" alternative has been so strong that I sometimes wonder if we needed to bother.
What are Glyph Walls?
The metaphor behind playing Sun Stones is that you are using a cache of magical stones to create art on the rocky surface of a cave. You close your eyes and receive a vision, which remains represented in abstract form when you open them again. Using that abstract guide, you place stones on the surface. Once the stones exactly match your vision, the stones disappear and the final artistic glyph is inscribed onto the surface. That's one puzzle, or level of the game.
But these glyphs don't just exist in a vacuum - between individual puzzles you view a "Glyph Wall" which shows groups of glyphs - finished and unfinished. These Glyph Walls generally have 8 glyphs or so, grouped by thematic elements and arranged to tell a story. As players move through the game and solve their visions, they are simultaneously revealing the story each Glyph Wall tells. For example, our second story is "The Hunt." It begins with a campfire, arrowheads, and then a series of deer prints. The prints lead to a deer, then an arrow in flight appears. The final puzzle is the deer's hide drying over the fire which began the sequence.
Glyph Walls = Story = Mechanics
An exciting challenge for the team has been to not only select thematic glyphs for each wall, but to simultaneously teach new mechanics and new types of goals within each story. In the hunt, you are learning to transmute orange sun stones into obsidian stones - a transformation which first happens with the fire and the arrowhead. Later we use Weaving as a metaphor to teach players how rows of black stones are transmuted into white stones, and so forth.
It has been an ongoing challenge to simultaneously develop our mechanics, aesthetics, and level progression. Various attempts by the team to separate these elements have resulted in some less-than-compelling experiences, so we've continued down this demanding path. I hope players enjoy the efforts we've put into making those relationships so seamless.
Our Secret Mechanics
We've been working hard to get the word out about Sun Stones the past few weeks - those of you in our social media spheres are doubtlessly inundated with tweets, blogs, posts, videos, and so forth. You could be forgiven for thinking that we're giving everything away.
But, in fact, our entire game has been conceived and developed with a sequence of secrets in its DNA. We have some awesome, awesome secrets which we hope will really ignite loyalty and interest from our players. Of course, since only a few people will actually have these secrets revealed through gameplay, we don't want to make the mistake of putting TOO much effort or energy into them. What use, after all, are secrets that nobody sees?
So this is our balancing act - to build a game which thrives on secret information, and to still put most of our time and energy into the forward-facing features which we need to sell the game concept with. I'm going to spoil one minor secret, as an example. You are forewarned!
The basic mechanic of our game is trivial - touch a stone to "pick it up" and release the touch to "put it down" where your finger is. We never explain this to anyone - it takes at most two-three seconds for people to figure it out. Beautiful and Elegant.
But our second mechanic is a bit harder, if only a little bit harder. It's this: horizontal or vertical lines of three or more "sunstones" will transmute into common black stones. Over the series of just a few puzzles we teach people to look for interesting opportunities to use this mechanic. Exactly where you create these transmutation lines becomes important. Do you transmute 3,4, or more stones at once? How about five stones in a right angle? Players discover the "three in a row" rule quickly, but they might not realize that both horizontal and vertical lines work, or that you can change the order in which you place sunstones to transmute larger groups all at once.
We push all of these concepts in individual puzzles which require you to make these leaps in order to achieve perfect scores. But if you don't go for the perfect score - you might be missing some of the subtleties of the mechanic for quite a while. We've experimented with different approaches, and our best guess at this time is that it is better to allow players to grow at their own pace rather than hold up some artificial stick for them to measure themselves by. We believe that our players are intelligent - it's in our charter manifesto - and so we don't want to deprive them of that magical learning moment.
Learning, after all, is where much of the fun originates in single-player games. Our job as game creators is to create interesting spaces for learning.
But, in fact, our entire game has been conceived and developed with a sequence of secrets in its DNA. We have some awesome, awesome secrets which we hope will really ignite loyalty and interest from our players. Of course, since only a few people will actually have these secrets revealed through gameplay, we don't want to make the mistake of putting TOO much effort or energy into them. What use, after all, are secrets that nobody sees?
So this is our balancing act - to build a game which thrives on secret information, and to still put most of our time and energy into the forward-facing features which we need to sell the game concept with. I'm going to spoil one minor secret, as an example. You are forewarned!
The basic mechanic of our game is trivial - touch a stone to "pick it up" and release the touch to "put it down" where your finger is. We never explain this to anyone - it takes at most two-three seconds for people to figure it out. Beautiful and Elegant.
But our second mechanic is a bit harder, if only a little bit harder. It's this: horizontal or vertical lines of three or more "sunstones" will transmute into common black stones. Over the series of just a few puzzles we teach people to look for interesting opportunities to use this mechanic. Exactly where you create these transmutation lines becomes important. Do you transmute 3,4, or more stones at once? How about five stones in a right angle? Players discover the "three in a row" rule quickly, but they might not realize that both horizontal and vertical lines work, or that you can change the order in which you place sunstones to transmute larger groups all at once.
We push all of these concepts in individual puzzles which require you to make these leaps in order to achieve perfect scores. But if you don't go for the perfect score - you might be missing some of the subtleties of the mechanic for quite a while. We've experimented with different approaches, and our best guess at this time is that it is better to allow players to grow at their own pace rather than hold up some artificial stick for them to measure themselves by. We believe that our players are intelligent - it's in our charter manifesto - and so we don't want to deprive them of that magical learning moment.
Learning, after all, is where much of the fun originates in single-player games. Our job as game creators is to create interesting spaces for learning.
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