Special Shading Puzzle Game
Henri Sellis, Kadi Sammul, Martin Hans Keskküla
Links
Special Shading Puzzle Game is a first-person puzzle game that revolves around looking at objects and places from different perspectives and under different light conditions. The player's goal is to inspect the environment and find clues that in turn lead to other clues. Progression is not hard-locked, meaning that the player can theoretically complete the game right away if (s)he knows where to look / what to do (perhaps from a previous playthrough), but there is a logical sequence of clues that lead to the final solution.
Puzzle types
As mentioned, all the puzzles are related to special visual aspects of the environment. Some environmental objects used for puzzles are:
- A mirror that behaves just like in real life, except it can be configured to reflect some colours or colour combinations (how much red, green and blue) more
- Objects whose textures' visuals are affected by the object's position and/or rotation in world space
- Objects whose textures' visuals are affected by the angle from which the player is looking at the object, and/or by the screen space position of the object for the player
- Secret clues that are hidden inside the different RGB channels of a texture and thus can only be seen under a specific light (image steganography)
Milestones
End result (21.01)
- Created room
- Added connected puzzles
- Improved lighting
- Discovered interesting facts
All three colors hidden with the same threshold, but resulting in different visibility.
Similar visibility when filtered.
red threshold 90,
green threshold 75,
blue threshold 100
When hidden green can be seen best but when filtered then worst.
Coach meeting (12.12)
- Improved lighting with player-controllable colour
- Control panel with 3 levers that can be used to configure the percentage of each colour that the mirror filters out
- Checkbox grid with 9 buttons that the player can press
- Paired objects whose colour changes per pixel depending on the other object's location
Initial progress (14.11)
- Game build: Nextcloud
- First person character controller
- Functional and (mostly) realistic mirror
- Real-time lighting
- Python notebook for creating textures with clues hidden inside colour channels
