The past week has mostly involved drawing new tile sets, animations, and making the world feel less static than it used to. Here, Gemini is finally walking in and out of doors!

First pics of Iris! Armless magic cyclops. Gemini's mid-game boss? Ally? Frenemy?? For the sake of the game’s story I’m probably going to leave their description at that.

Later in the story, Gemini discovers a powerful artefact that lets her summon a sand replica of herself, which can be controlled separately.

Earlier I mentioned there’d be some core changes to the gameplay! Here’s a lengthy summary for keen followers:

Stones, Boulders

Stones can now be both pushed AND pulled by holding the use key and pressing left or right. This is largely added to avoid situations where stones are moved into corners and can no longer be used.

There is a heavier, darker variant of stone called boulders that can’t be moved, but can still fall. They exist solely as obstacles.

Fire Traps

Fire traps don’t trigger automatically when they see Gemini anymore. Instead, they can be hit from a jump (or arrows, bombs, etc.) to release a fireball. There is a variant not pictured that also shoots fireballs continuously when activated by a switch.

Sand

There are no more “brick” blocks: sand more or less replaces them. Sand is not longer fragile and doesn’t break on touch anymore, but pressing the use key while next to one destroys it - kind of like Minecraft.

Buttons, Switches

Some buttons are now timed: when stepped off, their effects will persist for a short time. There are audio and visual cues that indicate how much time the effect will last. In the video, a crank is being lifted for a second after the button has been pressed!

There also switches, that are like one-time activated buttons. They are circular and can only be activated when hit by arrows, bombs. etc.

More

There is a rather large core mechanic for Gemini that I’m currently working on and will probably share once completed.

Boss sneak peek.

Haven’t had time to work on Gemini consistently since August, but I plowed through a lot of work in the past few days.

After a lot of playtesting, I realized a big problem with Gemini’s game design was how easy it was to get stuck on a level and forced to restart: if you broke an arrow/bomb crate at the wrong time or pushed a block into a corner. A lot of good puzzle games (Limbo, Portal, INSIDE) only restart on death, and gameplay is deliberately designed to avoid “stuck” states.

There are also problems with the existing objects. Too many objects had shared properties. With hazards like arrows and fireballs, the variety became a little too convoluted.

I started pulling out a lot of wires and rewriting things to fix these issues. I won’t talk about it too much until I’ve got it sorted out, but there are fairly significant gameplay changes coming. A lot of the code has also been refactored, and the world feels much more responsive and reactive!

Design takes a lot of iteration!