Brendon Chung's upcoming hacking-heisting hybrid Quadrilateral Cowboy caught our notice with its baud-beeps, script wizardry, and intuitive puzzles harnessing a mobile "deck" computer for solving. In a blog entry posted today, Chung began a series of in-depth looks at the code keeping Cowboy's code behaving normally. For now, Chung kept his focus on wrangling tracelines: a direct line from the player's view to whatever they observe.
Chung describes how a "ghost cursor" situated at the end of the traceline determines where objects get placed as the player shifts his or her view, starting from a fundamental "stupidly easy & simple implementation" (or SE&S, as Chung shortened it) to snapping multiple tracelines together to avoid ugly collision issues with the environment.
"If making your game lean is a goal, then stuff like this is definitely fat," Chung stressed. "Players have a finite amount of time and energy for you. Everything that goes into the project has to answer one question: Is it respecting the player's goodwill or squandering it?" At least I'll sound somewhat like a tech savant when I blame my inevitable puzzle failings on "those darn tracelines."
Quad Cow, as we're calling it around the office, is out this year. Here's a quick preview .
