Spire

Community Showcases
1

Hey everyone,

Spire is a short point and click game my brother and I are working on. It was heavily inspired by the game Myst and we hope to have it up for download soon.

http://www.grayboxgames.com/spire/main.html

2

Looking forward to trying it out! I’m a huge myst fan and also working on a Myst like game/scene on the side. Love the screenshot, keep up the great work. -Jeff

3

Looks interesting!

4

Very cool. Let us know when it’s ready for download. I’ll definitely check it out.

-BC

5

+1 on the fact that it looks cool… 8)

Keep us posted!

6

Looking cool, Myst and Riven were awesome games.

-Jeremy

7

i like the idea… and the concept you present looks sorta interesting…

…but, honestly, and this is only my opinion… one of the real draws to the MYST type experience is the immersive, detailed graphics… i think that you’ve gotta really enhance the artwork if you wanna enter that genre.

good luck with the project…

–Mike

8

I don’t like MYST that well, but RealMYST is awesome. Your game looks more like RealMYST than MYST, and I like it already.

9

Is that a men’s urinal at the base of the spire? :slight_smile:

It reminded me of “The Little Prince”. I find the style interesting (as you did) and it might work if it fits with the theme or mood of the game.

10

Well its finally up, you can download SPiRE from our new site:

http://www.grayboxgames.com/spire/main.html

This is our first game ever! and its thanks to Unity that we could actually make it.
This game was sort of a test to see what’s possible in Unity, so we tried to do a lot of different kinds of things. We’re really happy with how it came out, so we’re working on another game similar to this one (point and click adventure) but much much bigger.
We’re still working on Spire, so we’d appreciate any bug reports or suggestions.

11

Ok, you have now created my new favorite Unity game! However, I’m stuck at what I think is the end, and I am going to PM you so I don’t spoil it for everyone else. The prairie dog is my favorite part, but this whole thing is pretty awesome. Here are some suggestions:

(SPOILER ALERT!)

  1. Tone down the saturation of the green of the grass.

  2. Instead of having two flying buttons, just have a way to turn flying on or off, then just allow movement in a plane. To clarify, this could be the plane of your camera’s X-Z axes, or, it could be the world’s X-Z plane (as it is now), if the following is implemented: holding the space bar to go up, and releasing to let gravity pull you down. While the wings were “active”, gravity could pull you down at a reduced rate. This might be the best combination of all of this:

on the ground:

  • tap the space bar to initiate a jump
  • keep holding the space to bar to start flying

in the air:

  • hold the space bar to ascend
  • tap the space bar to “turn off” your wings (great for getting the hat)
    (Any time the space bar is held, ascension should occur. A small time window would exist to define the “tap”. This would mean a tiny rise before falling, which I think would be perfectly acceptable in order to have simplified controls.)

Another method would be using a double-tap to initiate flying, and another double tap to end it. This might provide more of a distinction between flying and non-flying modes, but is less relaxed than the tap-holding approach. There are further things you could do if you decide to incorporate double-clicking which would allow you to not worry about the gravity changes, but I think the motivation should be towards ease, not insane freedom, as this game does not require it.

a side note:

  • Flying is much too slow overall. if you choose to go after that exit sign, and proceed outside of the world, or if you get the hat AFTER you get the wings, the game becomes very slow and boring. An acceleration curve might prove to be a great idea.
  1. RealMyst had a great control scheme option that allowed you to move forward with left-click and backward with right-click. Obviously, strafing isn’t an option, here, but it does allow one to play with one hand. Whether you want to implement this is dependent on your target audience, of course, but I’d consider myself relatively hardcore, and I still liked that scheme a lot and used it. The joy of being able to eat or drink while playing (using the free hand) is not to be underestimated!

Because your game does give you the ability to jump and fly, which RealMyst did not have, you would either need to use left+right click for further control, or rely on the user remapping further mouse buttons, but that is only possible currently with your OS X standalone. As is often the case with the standalone games I see, however, your current options could stand to be cleaned up. There are currently three unnamed controls that use “Joystick Axis 0”, and there are a bunch of empty slots that can be removed.

  1. Sometimes, after the cutscene that occurs after all the balls go through, all but one of the ropes disappear, as does the metamorphosis frame. After a few times through, this seems to be a totally random occurrence.

  2. My tablet totally destroys this game. It will either teleport me around the world or cause insane graphical glitching that won’t go away until the game is restarted. A mouse/trackpad is obviously the thing to use for this game, but this behavior really ought to be corrected if possible.

12

I get an error when trying to play the web version on my PC. In Firefox and IE, it says that it’s only available for OSX right now. Is that intentional?

13

Ok, I finished it. New suggestions:

SPOILERS AGAIN!

  1. I was finding it very hard to figure out just what you needed to do to win. If you fly away without the right music on, it takes forever to get back. And because you already flew away, and nothing happened, you may not be motivated to try again. I had actually assumed that there was a key in the two music notes, but because they did nothing by themselves, I was then assuming they were just something to “play with” for a while. This is all very unintuitive to me.

  2. What’s the point of the cowboy hat? It takes either time or skill to acquire it, depending on if you have the wings, but it doesn’t seem to do anything.

Anyway, I’m disappointed by these elements, due to how great the rest of the game was, but you obviously have design talent, so maybe it will just be a matter of tweaking things or adding further content. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on your stuff!

14

I just ran into a little bug. I was looking through the telescope when the first ball triggered its cutscene. When the view returned to the spyglass, the grass plane was stuck in the bottom of the view, no matter where I looked and sometimes the telescope itself would come into view, which is a little strange.

Also, I’m totally stuck on what to do after using the nail. I can’t get that little nut or fruit or whatever off the track :frowning:

15

Check out the ghost of the shape you need. It took me a couple minutes to think of where I might find it, but it was there. It makes a lot of sense with the surrounding elements. Cool design, but it was the trickiest bit for me, except for figuring out how to “win”.

16

Great little game. I had no problems with it.

Love the logo btw.

The only thing wrong with it is that it was way too short.

17

OK, that was great! Pretty much what Jessy said, overall. I wasn’t able to get it to end, though…went to the exit sign, nothing happened, flew around for a while and went out of the level, still nothing. I was able to get the grasshopper to turn into a bunch of grasshoppers at one point; not sure what that was all about. :slight_smile:

–Eric

18

There it is. Maybe you can have the whole world inside a cage, which disappears, in order to indicate that the correct actions have been taken in order to escape. If you want to keep the hat in, maybe you could have a pegasus take the cage away, but only if the hat was collected. Because horses only listen to cowboys. Or something like that. :wink:

19

Well, as far as the hat goes, I actually had no idea what it was supposed to be until I read the messages here. So it’s just as well it didn’t do anything since I would have had no clue. :wink: There were some nice touches, like the door’s shadow inside the spire…in fact I wasn’t even quite able to figure out how that was done. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen rope actually modeled as rope in a realtime game; normally it’s done just as a cylinder with a texture on it… Definitely would be awesome to see more of stuff like this.

–Eric

20

What hat? What exit sign? I got the wings and started flying into the sky and all of a sudden the screen went white, then black and said “The End”.

:o I feel like I am missing something.