In previous devlogs, we’ve talked about our journey as a team, the genesis of the project, our inspirations, and our audience, but we haven’t talked much the game itself.

Today we’d like to remedy that, and show you the result of a month of work, the various prototypes we built, and the takeaways from of a few rounds of testing with players.

Early prototypes

The Tides of Ys is a 3D top-down mobile game, which means that the movement of the player character needs to be as simple as possible.

The first prototype we made focused on two things :

– Creating the tide system, making sure the water goes up and down the correct amount.

– Making the movement feel pleasant, which means tweaking the character’s speed and acceleration, ensuring it can navigate around obstacles, go up and down ledges, etc

Here’s one of the very first prototypes we made with those systems : 

The next step was to add some puzzle mechanics, so we made objects that can “float” on the water, and move up and down with the tides, while making sure the character can still walk on them :

First test level

With this, we started work on a first test “level”, that we used to explore what kind of level design could exist based on these mechanics, what our limitations were, and what we wanted to focus on next.

We also colored the different layers of the level to make the height differences more visible.

After a few tests, it became obvious this level has some flaws, most notably how it becomes difficult to see some of the paths when another part of the level goes in front of it.

This could be a feature onto itself, which would make the game more of a “find the path” type of puzzle. But this isn’t the direction we want to take the game design in, so we decided we needed to spread out the level more, avoid hidden paths, reduce the verticality, and make the game as a whole more readable.

A new direction

Our most recent prototypes feel a lot more “stretched out”, and use color in a more effective way to signal what can and cannot be accessed.

We developed two new mechanics for the floating objects : an “anchoring” system that locks objects at the bottom of the level until the player interacts with them, and a “boat” system, which lets players ride on floating objects from point A to point B and back.

The new prototype uses these mechanics to create more interaction, and feel more like a puzzle than an exploration game.

We also have a couple of other mechanics in the works, but none are quite finished yet. Here’s a little sneak peek :

Making a game is a constant process of iteration, and every time we try something new we learn, and we improve. We’ll continue iterating on our mechanics and levels to refine them, and we hope you’ll continue to follow us on this journey.