Manifold Garden Demo Available Through Fall Festival
To celebrate our upcoming Steam launch on the October 20th, a free demo for Manifold Garden is now available for the duration of The Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition.
The demo contains the first few areas of the game, introducing some of the physical rules that are core to the experience, including gravity changing, cubes, and world-wrapping, and gives you a taste of some of the puzzles.
We'll also be running a couple of special Steam streams hosted by Bumpy McSquigums, featuring Manifold Garden designer William Chyr. The next one is on the 9th, 1-3pm Eastern. We hope to see you there!
Manifold Garden Demo
Manifold Garden is a puzzle game that reimagines physics and space. Explore a universe filled with architectural dreamscapes, master their rules, and transform a sterile world into a garden that’s full of life.
The Manifold Garden demo contains the first few areas of the game. It introduces some of the physical rules that are core to the experience, including gravity changing and world-wrapping, and gives you a taste of some of the puzzles.
Developed over the course of seven years, Manifold Garden has been nominated for several awards, including “Best Debut” from the Game Developers Choice Awards and BAFTA Game Awards. It was selected as one of the New Yorker’s best games of 2019.
Oct 9, 1PM EST: Manifold Garden live stream featuring creator William Chyr
We'll be streaming to the Manifold Garden steam store page first on October 7th to kick off the festival and then again on the 9th from 1-3PM Eastern. Hosting the events will be streamer Bumpy McSquigums, with special guest William Chyr himself (creator of Manifold Garden). If you can't make it, William will be streaming periodically on his Twitch channel over the next few weeks as well. Either way, we hope to see you in chat!
Manifold Garden launches October 20th, 2020
Hello!
We are excited to announce that Manifold Garden will be coming to Steam on October 20th, 2020.
[previewyoutube="_ptMguJyEgM;full"]
In addition to the base game, Manifold Garden will also be available as a Deluxe Edition bundle, which will include the soundtrack by Laryssa Okada. The game will contain all of the bug fixes and content updates to date, including new areas and puzzles, as well as features like photo mode. And of course, the game will have community assets like achievements, trading cards, badges, and profile backgrounds.
Manifold Garden has won critical acclaim. Over the course of the past year, it has been honored with nominations from the GDC Awards and BAFTA Game Awards, and has appeared on “Best of 2019” lists from outlets like ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘Eurogamer’.
To celebrate the upcoming launch, we will be releasing a special demo tomorrow as part of the Steam Games Festival. If you are curious about Manifold Garden’s impossible worlds, this is a great way to try out the game.
We are in the final phase of polish for Manifold Garden, and things have been quite busy. Near the end of last year, we took a step back and looked at the design of the game as a whole. Up until then, we had a lot of different ideas, but the game lacked focus. There wasn’t a clear sense of direction, and players were constantly getting lost and frustrated.
It took some time and a lot of trial and error, but we were able to restructure the game in a way that made it a much more focused experience. It had an arc that carried the player through the journey.
Currently, we’re going through the same process, but this time for the ending. In a lot of ways, the ending is like a microcosm of the entire game. It needs to tie together all the different threads, and contain within it its own narrative arc. We’ve gone through a few different versions, and have thrown out a lot of ideas, but we’re finally getting close.
Optimization and QA
They say the last 10% of a project is 90% of the work, and that couldn’t be more true for Manifold Garden. We’ve been making a lot of optimization improvements, and the game is running better than ever. However, these improvements often require fundamental changes in the way the game is organized. This often introduces new bugs - even in systems that were previously working fine. It can feel a bit like playing whack-a-mole when it comes to bug fixing.
QA is getting really important now - we’re developing test suites and following a rigorous schedule. We make daily builds and try to catch any new bugs while in their early phases. We’re also going to be working with third-party experts to make sure the game runs well on various configurations.
Visual Improvements
We are still continuing to refine the art style. A few years ago, someone described the game as having “too much manifold, not enough garden”. Early on, I placed a lot of emphasis on mechanics and puzzles, and not much on the aesthetics.
Now that the game is in place, we’ve been able to return to previous areas to make improvements. A lot of the new changes really help make the world of Manifold Garden feel alive.
We recently captured some 4K footage of the game that I thought looked pretty cool. You can check them out here:
’ve been more quiet in recent months - I haven’t been streaming regularly nor have I been posting much on twitter. It has also been a while since the last youtube video. Rest assured it’s not because we don't have much to report, but quite the opposite - there’s been so much going on that we haven’t really had a chance to slow down and reflect.
The team has grown significantly. We recently brought on Kevin Wong as a producer to help us get through this final stage. Kevin worked on the local multiplayer game Chambara and was a producer on Lucah: Born of a Dream. Geert Nellen, who helped us find the game’s focus and streamline the experience last year, has returned to help us with the ending. Joining him this time is our friend Droqen. They worked on Metrico and Starseed Pilgrim, respectively, so lots of design experience between them.
It’s a chaotic but exciting time for Manifold Garden’s development.
Performance Improvements and Music System Deep Dive
Another development update.
For the most part the game is running at 60FPS on PC. We've optimized meshes significantly (in some places reducing the size by 40%) and have smoothed out a lot of the major bumps in the game.
Where we are seeing issues is in large levels with highly detailed geometry adjacent to other similarly sized levels. To tackle this we've written several tools to track the memory usage and performance of each level in the game. This has allowed us to evaluate our effectiveness and pinpoint which areas are problematic. It's a slow and tedious process but we're making steady progress.
Ending Refinement Getting the game playable from start to finish was a huge milestone for us, but there were still a few areas that were quite rough. Based on feedback from testers the first draft of the ending didn't feel very focused. I've been redesigning the ending using this feedback as well as lessons learned from making the first ending.
Music System
If you're interested in how the music system in Manifold Garden works, I did a deep dive video recently. It's much longer than the typical development update videos, but I go into great depth explaining the architecture, showcasing the debug tools that we made, and how it’s all implemented in the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efifZwwcXtA
That's it for this time. I can't announce a ship date yet but we do have a window in mind. Hopefully we will be able to share it with you all soon.
Don't forget to wishlist the game! Here are several other options for staying up to date:
Graphics Improvements, New Music System, and Dev Update Video #16
The latest development update video is now up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNiRr8Y0t-Y&feature=youtu.be
In this one, I cover new graphics improvements, the new music system, and address some concerns about design that people have expressed to me.
Visual Improvements
Last month, we updated the graphics system to address some ongoing issues with shadows. However, it was a pretty significant update and initially broke several other visual effects. It took a while to track down all the issues, but the good news is we’ve fixed them now and the current system is overall better than it was before.
Black Hole Particle Improvements
Besides shadows, another element we improved is the look of these black hole boxes. In the game, they represent a kind of corruption. However, they were breaking the world wrapping illusion:
To achieve the world wrapping effect in Manifold Garden, we place duplicate versions of the world around the main one.
The play area is defined as a box. When the player reaches one face of the box, we teleport them to the other side. It’s simple in theory, but the key is you have to make it look seamless.
The reason for the black holes popping in visually was that they did not have fog applied, so they didn't transition smoothly like everything else. We added fog, but the problem here is that material colors fade out before the edges do. While the fog applies to the material, it does not apply to the edges.
The problem with this, however, is that having the black hole boxes fade out early looks weird. They’re supposed to represent corruption. It’s supposed to be the darkest material in the world, but they don’t look that way.
Arthur, who’s been the main architect for the graphics system, ended up applying a different fade to the black hole material. Now it actually fades out even slower then the lines. It’s very subtle, but in the distance, they appear slightly darker than the edges. It’s as if they’re darker than black.
Music System
The new music system is better explained in the video, as you can hear what we're working on.
We recently redid the music system in Manifold Garden to make it more flexible and modular. The old system was very limited in functionality and the code was quite messy, which made it difficult to make changes and add new music. Customization used to take hours, whereas now it takes minutes.
The new system has each area’s behaviour separated into their own managers, which makes everything a lot more organized. All of these managers extend from a single base class called “MusicTrackerGroup”. This class is a group of music trackers. Each MusicTracker is responsible for managing a single FMOD sound event for the music, and how fade in and out that sound, how to manage FMOD parameters, and saving or loading data from the save file as needed.
We have a default behaviour for music that we can use if a level doesn’t need any customization. If a piece of music is assigned to a level and uses the default behaviour, then when the player enters the scene, it fades out the last music and starts to fade in the new one, with a bit of overlap. It works fine, but we actually try not to use this default behaviour too much. The reason is that while the game space is broken down into scenes (for management purposes), we to want the players to experience the world as being seamless. The spaces connect to each other, so it wouldn’t make sense if every time you were in another room, a different music played.
Internally, we have this idea of "music sentences", where a piece of music might begin in one scene, and then continue throughout others, creating and enforcing a sense of connection between the spaces.
_______________________________________
Anyway, lots of places to stay up to date. You can wishlist the game, join our discord, or stop by one of my development streams.
I know some of you are wondering what's still left to do in Manifold Garden, and why it hasn't shipped, especially since in the last update I said the game is playable from start to finish.
I recently put together a short video summarizing the last several years of development down to 17 minutes, so you can see what's been done so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrK2U07kfV0
If you want more details on the current state of the game, and what's still left to be done, I also made a roadmap of development: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o4NcmTW7WuXoMasQbxSnv72rhR-GtX9xTN1EebKuERw/edit?usp=sharing
It covers where things are currently at with design, tech, art, and audio, as well as what's left to do for each.
Finally, we also have a public trello board if you want to follow more closely the bugs we're working on: https://trello.com/b/DqStaye6/manifold-garden-community
The Game Is Playable Start To Finish + Development Update Video #12
Hey all!
Back again with another update and video. I know I haven't been keeping up with updates here as frequently. We've just been keeping our heads down and working away on the game.
I have got some good news. The game is now finally playable from start to finish. You can start from the start screen, play through the game, get to the ending, get the credits sequence, and then go back to the start screen.
Needless to say, this is a major milestone for us.
I've included more information and game footage in the latest development update video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQyc7rDkGvM
This one ended up longer than usual, but there was a lot of ground to cover.
Tech
The save system and level loading system had been persistent problems for a long time, and getting the two to work together was especially challenging. A large part of the issue was due to the complexity of these systems. Manifold Garden has persistent save - you can carry objects between levels, save the game at any point and restore to that exact state. On top of that, we have dynamic level loading - once the game starts, there is no load screen of any kind. Instead, levels are loaded and unloaded automatically in the background.
Behind the scenes, there's a lot going on. Scenes need to be tracked and save data needs to be updated accordingly. If a particular scenario is overlooked, it's easy to end up with duplicate data, causing the game to not load or save. This was a major problem for playtesters as it prevented them from progressing very far. After spending quite a bit of time tackling this issue, we're happy to say that these issues are fixed. At least, we haven't seen observed them in the playtests for a while.
Otherwise, for tech, it’s been a lot of little bugs here and there. Object physics behaving weirdly in certain points, being able to noclip into the wall if you change gravity at just the right angle, stuff like that. We’ve been addressing these as they come up.
Audio
We were having a lot of issues with audio at one point. Sounds crackling, sounds getting delayed, sounds not playing at all.
In the end, a lot of it turned out to be the way we had things set up in FMOD. For the team, this was our first time using FMOD, and there’s a lot of nuance to the program. The number of active voices you can have, which sounds are streamed, etc. A lot of the problems didn’t come up when testing individual levels, but once you have the whole game running, and hundreds of objects loaded all emitting sound, that was when it became an issue. Fortunately, a lot of the problems have since been addressed.
We also added a custom audio occlusion system. While the basics of the system were straightforward, getting audio occlusion to work across portals proved to be much trickier.
In the video, starting a 5:55, you can check out a short preview of the audio design and an explanation of the audio occlusion system.
Art
The art style of the game is pretty finalized. Most of the remaining tasks are polish.
There are minor things like the button here needing to be updated to match the style of the cube.
We still need to play around with color correction as well. This is especially evident in the green gravity.
All in all though, the art issues are fairly minor.
Design
Design has undergone a massive and significant change in the last 6 months. It became clear with the most recent playtests that the layout of the world was too convoluted. Additionally, there was too much emphasis on large open areas. While these do provide stunning vistas, they were overused, which lead to a lot of pacing issues.
We've been focusing on streamlining the core experience, and adding more diversity in level size and design. There are now more mid-sized indoor levels in between the large outdoor spaces, which provide strong contrast and a better sense of progression through the game. Previously, we were seeing players getting to 90 minutes, and just stopping due to feeling overwhelmed or lost. Now, we’re seeing players go for 4, 5 or more hours.
Production
Between the design changes, development, and overseeing the project, I haven’t really had much time left for anything else.
We’re on track to get the game out in early 2019. I know at the beginning of this year that I said 2018 was going to be the year. We didn’t quite make it, but we did make really significant progress. There are still several things that need to be sorted before we can announce a launch date, but we’re getting there.
I’m excited to be in this final stretch. It’s been a long journey, but there’s still ways to go, but I’m so happy to have made it this far. In the coming months, we’re going to be publishing a series of articles and videos explaining all the tech of the game in detail: how our graphics pipeline works, how we’re optimizing levels, and so on.
If you want to stay up-to-date, there are a couple of options:
We are currently focusing on audio design. In addition to making the actual sound effects and filters, I also have to make a lot of tools to help us balance and debug audio.
Above is a custom tool I built to enable and disable each sound effect in the game. This is really important if we're trying to tweak the timing and volume level of one specific sound. Even with an action as simple as pressing a button to open a door involves a multitudes of sounds. This tool allows us to disable everything except one, and has been incredibly useful.
Another tool is shown above. This displays every sound that is currently playing in the game. Initially, audio debugging was very frustrating. I'd hear an incorrect sound playing, but would not be able to tell where it was coming from or what it was. With this tool, I can see a list of all the sounds currently playing, which categories they're in, and how many there are.
It's been useful figuring out which sounds are not being called to stop when they're supposed to, or which ones have duplicates.
It also has the bonus feature of filtering out certain sounds, such as water and laser, from being displayed. The reason is that these sounds involve multiple sound emitters for one object, and if each one is printed out, it can take up the entire display.
