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If you're looking for a fantastic (adventure-puzzle) game with a very unique graphical style, I recommend Return of the Obra Dinn, by Lucas Pope (of Papers Please).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn

Truly, truly unique gem that implements detective work really well, and has a mind-bendingly disorienting art style. Spoiler-free trailer with some example gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILolesm8kFY



Lucas Pope is a one man army. He even did the music for that game, which is just as good as the other aspects.


He kept a very detailed devblog on TIGSource, documenting all the aspects of making the game including sound, modeling and shader programming. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?action=profile;u=3073...

Also there is an interview from Ars Technica talking about his story from Naughty Dog to Indie and why he like to work as one man team. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...


One of the things that really pops out to me in the interview on arstechnica is his love of writing 'tools' - so do I..

I had a similar issue when I was working on educational CD's back in the dark ages - 660MB just wasn't large enough for all the voice-over we needed to fit the script we were given.

We couldn't go lower than 16-bit/22k/mono without making it painful to listen to, had to come up with another idea..

The key was to work out that the v/o artist we used had 7 phrasings/cadences, and as there were ~7 questions per section she was already phrasing the lesson correctly.

So instead of having to use an entire intro+question+correct/incorrect recording I could instead splice the intro and correct/incorrect responses (mostly) depending on their location in the lesson.

To just substitute based on position in lesson didn't work though, so the 'Audio Matcher' tool was born.

Allowed us to get over 3+ hours of natural sounding questions & answers audio onto a single CD. (..loved writing and using that tool) (..and yes of course we could have simply gone to production with 2 CD's - but that would have cost 2x as much, required installation and not have been anywhere near as cool)


Also check out Helsing's Fire for devices. I don't generally rave about this kind of puzzle games, but like everything Pope does, the attention to details is outstanding.


I meant "for iDevices" but my phone's autocorrect got in the way :(


Also for anyone interested in the technical side of the dithering in Return of the Obra Dinn, be sure to check out this forum post by the developer https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...


I can really relate to this commenter on the thread:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg139857...

Often times, you only see the final product, thinking "that can't be that hard!", only to realize that there is a ton of things that had to be done before. I, personally, like reading devlogs. It helps me staying sane over my personal projects.


Thank you for linking this. What a treasure.




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