The Art of Syzygy — Part III
Riccardo Caprari

Hi, welcome to the last in a series of articles where I discuss technical issues I had to overcome while working on the visuals of my game Syzygy. In this last part, we will tackle various miscellaneous topics that where left out in previous instances: every one of them is structured like a standalone chapter, so feel free to read only the ones you are interested in. Let's start with how the game background works.

Background

The main constraints envisioned for the backgrounds were the following:

  1. to be filled by procedural patterns defined as functions that take the position of a cell and return a color value;
  2. to have a unique one for every level;
  3. to look like a sea.

These requirements demanded a solution that could potentially have a very large number of variations, but deterministic in nature. I initially thought about using fluid-simulating cellular automata or fractals, but both turned out to be too computationally intensi

Read more

The Art of Syzygy — Part II
Riccardo Caprari

Hi, welcome to the second in a series of articles where I talk about some noteworthy technical problems I encountered during the development of my video game Syzygy. In this part, we are going to address how sprites are rendered and some interesting consequences that arise from the method used.

Remember that our initial goal was to have every element in the game reflect the change in shape and we put quite some effort into animating the game map. A really simple idea comes to mind: maps are made by square tiles and sprites are made by square pixels; therefore, we can just draw the sprites as if they were maps. The small caveat is that we must reduce to zero the spaces between shapes, making them all contiguous.

Obviously, turning every pixel into a full-fledged polygon is very costly, but there are some mitigating factors that render the whole endeavor possible: [ol]

  • sprites are extremely small (never more than 32 pixels in any dimension, often much less);
    • [li]being

    Read more

    The Art of Syzygy — Part I
    Riccardo Caprari

    Hi, this is the first in a series of articles where I will cover some technical problems and solutions that occurred to me during the development of my game Syzygy. The fact that these problems presented themselves in the first place depends on a long and articulated series of game design decision that will be taken for granted and will not be discussed in these posts.

    But first of all, we must at least clarify what the game is about. Syzygy is a puzzle game centered around the possibility of changing the connectivity of a grid-based map from squares to triangles and hexagons at any moment. That's quite a mouthful, see the following gif for a visual clarification:

    From this basic concept, it is possible to articulate many puzzles, mainly centered around how you and other types of creatures can (or cannot) move in such a peculiar environment. Given that, all visual elements should contribute

    Read more