The Past Within News

Our friends testplaying the game!

Today we’re back with another devlog! As promised we want to dive a bit deeper into the puzzle design for our upcoming 2-player game The Past Within. But first, we’d like to offer some more insights into how the puzzles for our previous Rusty Lake and Cube Escape games were designed.

When we started making Rusty Lake games, we wanted to create a foundation for our games using the basic principles from those early Room Escape flash games: you are trapped in a room and you have to find keys, codes or specific items that help you progress through a level and, in the end, escape the room (or defeat a terrifying corrupted soul for example). Having only four walls helps to keep the space around you clear and easy to understand. We also try to stick to two basic rules: “the player should be able to use everything in the room” and “do not give the player too many options”. And since you are not always escaping the room itself in our games, we strive to give the player a sense of progress, a clear goal to reach. Examples are completing the machine in Birthday, the different shows in Theatre or collecting the cubes in Seasons or Paradox. That way we give the player a structured puzzle experience while simultaneously giving ourselves more freedom to stuff the game with atmosphere, strange twists and mind-bending puzzles.

Puzzle examples from Cube Escape: Seasons, Paradox, The Mill and Rusty Lake: Roots

One of the first items you find in several of our games is the box of matches. While this became sort of a running gag over time, it actually has a purpose: it is a recognizable item, as most players will know what to do with matches: light a candle or set anything else on fire.
This way we make players familiar with the gameplay and the environment, it’s always nice to have a few interactions before the real puzzling begins.

After this we try to give the players an interesting variety of puzzles:

• You have to use an item you have found on the right object.
  
• You have to solve a stand-alone puzzle. This can be a sliding puzzle on a cabinet but also a sequence puzzle on a specific object.
  
• You have to find a code. This can be a basic 4-digit code on a piece of paper, but can also be way more complex, like the scale-in-the-ear of Arles or the binoculars puzzle in Roots.
  
• You have to solve a more extensive minigame, like the 9-room puzzle or tower defence game in Paradox.
  

Puzzle examples from Rusty Lake: Hotel, Samsara Room and Cube Escape: Paradox

The inspiration for these puzzles often arises from the location or theme of the room: for Arles, we looked at the Van Gogh painting and looked for puzzle possibilities in the decoration of the room. In Hotel every guest had his own profession or hobby. Samsara Room has the animal themes. We always choose a location that works within the story and offers us enough opportunities to create interesting puzzles.

To keep every new game fresh and exciting we spent a lot of time designing a new or different layer of puzzles or a slightly different way of gameplay, which gives space for new kinds of puzzles. Another thing we enjoy doing is extending the experience with puzzles outside a particular game; e.g. connecting Seasons and The Lake with a special code, finding secret hints in the Paradox short film or visiting the mentalhealthandfishing.com website after playing The White Door.

The Past Within

When we started creating The Past Within (as a single-player experience) we tried using all these basic puzzle principles, but unfortunately, it didn’t match with 2D and 3D environments and the story we wanted to tell (as you can read in devlog 1 and 2). After changing it to co-op experience we had a breakthrough, but this also meant we had to approach the whole ‘puzzle designing’ process from a new angle. For the first time, we had to design puzzles around communication, where two players have completely different environments.

The majority of the puzzles in our other games are based on certain visual hints: symbols you find, an item you have to place on an object either because it matches its appearance or because of pictures with useful information hanging on the wall. But in The Past Within, you only see half of the puzzles and in order to solve it, you need to both describe any visual hints to the other player and listen to hints/clues from the other player. This makes the game fun, but also more complex. Therefore our two rules “the player should be able to use everything in the room” and “do not give the player too many options” become even more important.

The Past Within co-op puzzle example: 3D vs 2D

Playtesting is, more than ever, a very important part of the puzzle design process. We are often surprised by how the players communicate since they often describe visual hints in ways we didn’t think of ourselves. Some puzzles turn out easier than we thought, others harder. It’s more difficult to predict how the game is played than with our other games. Which is interesting to see, but also means that we need to allow ourselves to be flexible with the puzzle designs we make, and adapt based on what we see during these playtests.

To let you get used to the idea of how The Past Within works, we designed a small puzzle for you and a friend to try out (yes, you can do it by yourself, but we’d really like for you to get a feeling for how The Past Within will work). Feel free to join our Discord, find a friend there to play with, and work together to solve this small test puzzle. Make sure the other person chooses the other Player and start to communicate what you see!

Choose Player:

Player 1 Player 2


Did you work together and found the answer? Congrats! Please keep it to yourself and share it with us here: https://forms.gle/1oe3otcH4SUHeSYn7. We’ll be giving a 1000 piece Rusty Lake puzzle box to 3 pairs of players!

1000 piece Rusty Lake puzzle depicting the famous Roots painting by Johan Scherft!

We will be back with another devlog! Stay tuned!

Greetings from The Lake!🚣‍♂️

Thank you so much for your support of our first devlog! Today we will share more about why The Past Within became a multiplayer game and the main inspirations during this process.

Although we started very enthusiastically on this project, it took us almost a year to design the first 3D single-player experience with the right structure. With most of the Rusty Lake games, we could always rely on the boundaries of a 2D room together with the core gameplay concept of gathering items and solving puzzles. But when creating a 3D puzzle game we needed a new way of thinking and we had to start from scratch. Of course, we played The Room, Birdcage and similar puzzle games which are designed around 3D objects, but our plan was to intertwine the 3D and 2D world. The shoebox idea (Devlog 1) was the base of this design, and we were eager to prove this could give a unique touch to this genre.

First testplays with a 3D Puzzle Cube

While working on the first levels we got the opportunity to showcase a demo of The Past Within at Indie Megabooth, PAX East, March 2020. This event became the perfect milestone for us to finalise and present a version of our first 3D cube game that had enough puzzle and story elements for players to test. For this demo, we created a tombstone-styled cube with a peephole that players could use to get hints from the inside, to solve puzzles on the outside. It was a big challenge to create a 3D cube that had a similar (graphic) style and feeling as a Rusty Lake game. Our usual drawings and designs used in the 2D world didn’t easily translate to the 3D world. However, after playing with different concepts and models, our team came up with a style that, in our opinion, managed to blend in both worlds perfectly.

Showcasing the first demo of The Past Within at the IndieMEGABOOTH, PAX East 2020

During PAX, fans and players really enjoyed the first demo of The Past Within; interacting with a 3D cube was fun, the puzzles worked well, and everyone confirmed that the style and gameplay maintained the Rusty Lake feel, while also being new and exciting. Unfortunately for us, before and after the event it became clear that the game, in that initial state, was lacking certain elements. The more we brainstormed about creating new levels while keeping the inside (2D) and the outside (3D) gameplay interesting enough, the more we realized that we couldn’t make the puzzles and (the progressing) story for this project as fun and engaging as we normally could.

It was a month after the event that we got the idea of separating the rooms completely. What if one player is playing in 2D and the other in 3D? Creating two separate experiences would turn out to be the key for this project. It was not easy to throw almost everything we had in the bin and change the experience completely, but the more we thought about moving from a single-player experience to a multiplayer experience, the more excited we got. We were already big fans of awesome multiplayer escape room games like Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, the We Were Here series and we also had fun playing Keep Talking, Nobody Explodes (all amazing games we strongly recommend to everyone). The idea of having two separate worlds was a much better fit for a 2 player experience, and after a while, it almost felt weird that we never thought of this idea before. The second question we needed to ask ourselves was: should this be an online or offline experience? In the end, we settled on an offline experience and centred the gameplay around the communication between both players, similar to Tick Tock and Keep Talking, Nobody Explodes.

First concept of a 2-player experience; helping each other to progress

As you can see, we had quite the wild ride till this point. After the challenge of creating a Rusty Lake experience in 3D with the right style and an interesting gameplay concept, we were now faced with a new difficulty: creating puzzles for a 2-player experience. We will go
more in-depth about creating puzzles for Rusty Lake and The Past Within in the next devlog, so please stay tuned for that!

Thank you for reading! We hope to see you in the next one!

Rusty Lake

PS. Now we’re here why not have a contest as well!! 🥳 Tag us in your Albert fanart on social media (or send it via contest[at]rustylake[dot]com) and we’ll giveaway a T-shirt to 5 of our favourite submissions!

We're celebrating Albert's birthday with our first ever devlog! First of all thank you so much for sharing your burning questions - we will do our best to answer most of them in a series of devlogs about The Past Within. Working on this game has been a long journey (more than 2 years) with a lot of ups and downs - and while we are furiously working towards a release, we'd love to give you a peek inside our development process, our progress so far, and share our struggles along the way.

A short history

When we finished the Paradox project we knew we had to make something different. We had to improve, innovate and just try out new things. We came up with a lot of prototypes - one of which turned into The White Door! During this period we also explored the possibility of creating a Rusty Lake project in Unity - knowing that Flash will die soon. We teamed up with fellow Dutch developers Luuk and Martijn to explore the capabilities of Unity. We started out with a remake of Samsara Room in Unity, and while doing this we investigated the option of adding an extra level with a 3D cube (you might remember the 3D influence when navigating outside the window towards the cube).

The first designs of the 3D puzzle cube

Months passed and it turned out that creating puzzles around a level with a 3D cube was way more exciting than the 2D remake. At that point we decided to fully commit to creating a new game based around the 3D puzzle cube, rather than it being an extra level in an existing 2D game. The most interesting part of this puzzle cube was the idea of having a peephole. A way to look into the cube, almost like looking into a shoebox.

Having a different perspective brought many new opportunities to the table. It would be the first time you could really peek into a 2D Cube Escape-style room from the outside - zoom out and then move around the box with smooth 3D gameplay. Having a lot of elements outside the room that could influence the inside was a new kind of gameplay that made us very excited!

The shoebox idea and a build in which you could activate the electricity on the outside, to turn a light on inside

From there we made many many iterations in both gameplay and story. But the core remained the same; we wanted to combine the inside (2D) view and the outside of a cube (3D). The most important part to us is that we remained enthusiastic about the project and its main charachter and that's also why we released our first teaser on April 26th, exactly 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jLARnxZsM

In the next devlog we will share why this new gameplay structure turned out to be both a blessing and a curse! Furthermore we will look into some inspirations for this project.

Thank you for reading, hope to see you in the next one!

Rusty Lake

PS. Wishlist now (it helps!):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1515210/The_Past_Within
Also The Lake turns 6 this week! To celebrate together with all of you lovely people, we'll have a Big Sale and a special surprise this week across all platforms, so stay tuned for that: https://store.steampowered.com/developer/rustylake

Roughly 2 years ago we first got the idea for The Past Within. Since then, the project went through various iterations in both gameplay and style as you can see in the image above.

We’d like to share some of our development journey with you through devlogs from the initial stages all the way to the upcoming release of the game.

Any burning question or topics you’d like for us to tackle? Let us know in the comments below!