Update January 2023

Hi! As you have seen in the videos I posted, I worked on a major 4D Toys update. It's basically done and will release in February. It focuses on features that people have been requesting for a long time:

- Rotating your 3D slice arbitrarily. It rotates around the center of the level unless you are holding an object in your hand in which case it rotates around the object. This ensures that the level is always in view. Incidentally, you can also hold a shape while you rotate your slice and it will rotate with you. You can also rotate the slice in 90 degree increments (similar to Miegakure) for greater clarity.

- A lot of structures made to play with "marbles" and roll them around, such as the bridge I've shown. I will talk more about that later.

- Projection of the 2D faces of the objects (similar to the 1D lines from update 1.6 4d-toys-version-1-6-wireframe-projections). I've had a general version of that in Miegakure since the beginning, so I integrated it.

- Scenes with Tesseracts that are fixed at a point but with a force that keeps them rotating, including a couple of scenes with a double rotation (two perpendicular planes of rotation at the same time).

- The same technique as what-is-that-shape-at-the-end-of-the-trailer but only keeping the 1D lines of each cell instead of the 2D faces. I did this because it goes well with the 2D Face projection, as you'll see!

- A static Klein bottle with a sphere that you can roll inside, so you can get a feel for what "inside" a 2D Klein bottle in 4D even means.

- A 120 cell (faces) and a sphere together.

- Auto-Follow the last touched shape. While active, your slice always moves to the position of the last shape you touched. It's fun to use on marble scenes to follow a marble around at a weird slice orientation.

On the Miegakure front the collisions for the buildings are basically done, and there are not many characters left to make. I did a playtest with my friends Colin and Sarah Northway, who had played the game a few years ago and got very far along. So here I let them play new parts of the game that are towards the end of the game. I think only a couple people or even sometimes no-one had played these levels and it still went very well, except for one level that was too much "guess what the game designer wants" but I know how I can fix it.

This showed me that I have a pretty good instinct now for designing levels without having to get feedback on them all the time. But it still feels very nice to see someone else play, because you get fresh ideas through their eyes.

It made me think about how in puzzle design there is a concept of clarity:

Some puzzles are very clear conceptually, and that makes them very fun to play, because the player is not spending much time understanding the situation, and instead can quickly focus on the interesting consequence of the mechanics.

On the other hand, some puzzles are almost the opposite in that they are about understanding the situation and parsing though the noise for the information. It's not necessarily bad, and sometimes unavoidable (as in: I don't know another way to showcase some consequence) but I prefer the first kind a lot!

I could keep writing but I need to stop. I'm always surprised at how long these updates get!