Lambda Enigma News

Come and join me while I work on various tasks related to my next planned update of Lambda Enigma.

WARNING: There will be some spoilers.



Anyone interested in Lambda Enigma, or just game development in general, is welcome!

I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts about Lambda Enigma if you've played it already.

• What do you like about it?
  
• What don't you like about it?
  
• Did you run into any major or minor issues while installing or playing?
  
• Did the game meet your expectations based on its Steam Store page?
  

See you there!

- Dave

Hey everyone,

It's been 1 week since Lambda Enigma was released in Early Access. And I hope you've all had a great week!

I've been hard at work on the next release. In this short announcement, I'd like to briefly share some info and images with you regarding what I've been working on.

WARNING: This post may contain spoilers.

I'll also mention that I haven't received much feedback yet, so if you've already played the game then please let me know what you liked, or what you didn't like, about it. Your feedback is valuable to me!

In the meantime, I'm simply prioritizing what I had already planned to work on from the beginning. I have a ton of ideas, so I'll just continue working through my list.


On the initial start menu, when you press the button to start (or continue) your game, you may have noticed that sometimes the loading indicator is shown for several seconds. Actually, it's not loading at all, it's just waiting for the start screen video's frame to synchronize with the introduction video's frame, for a smooth transition.

You don't actually have to wait. If you just left click once, then you can skip directly to the intro video! Furthermore, after you've seen the intro video at least once, you can then left click to skip that too the next time that you startup the game.

In hindsight, I think it was a bad choice to show a loading indicator while the game waits for up to several seconds to sync two videos. It gives the misconception that the game's loading performance is really slow, when in fact it was already done loading before the start menu was displayed.

After the video frame syncs, you'll then watch a short video in which you'll fly toward the workshop, enter through a broken window, and eventually arrive at the workbench. You're not presented with any context about what's going on, or even a hint at the story.

I'm solving both of these issues by working on a better transition to start the game. Note that it's still going to be skippable by left clicking, after you've already watched it in full at least once before. This new transition will also introduce a bit more of the story's context. Here's a screenshot of work in progress:

(Mouse over for spoiler...)


Maze puzzles are still under development. I'm continuing to work on their infrastructure to make them fully playable and stable. But I really like how they're coming along so far!

I'd like to share one teaser video with you that I think illustrates (or at least hints at) how the maze puzzles fit into the theme of the coding puzzles in Lambda Enigma, and how these mazes aren't just your typical "maze" puzzles that I'm sure you're all probably expecting. No, that would just be way too boring, and it wouldn't be unique at all! Lambda Enigma is all about, at least what I feel is, a unique approach to solving puzzles, via writing code of course!

(Mouse over for spoiler...)
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
NOTE: This is not in-game footage! It's a video that I rendered in Blender, but it does use the actual 3D models and animations that are currently in my development build of the game as I work on the maze puzzles.

[h2]Graphics[/h2]

• Fixed a major performance issue that was caused by having realistic lighting enabled while in full screen mode if the player had multiple monitors.
  

[h2]General[/h2]

• The name of the current beta branch, if the player is able to opt-in to one, is now displayed on the bottom-right corner of the pause menu instead of the "Early Access" label.
  
  • At the time of writing there aren't any public beta branches yet, but I do plan on opening one in the future.
    

Whew, that took a minute.

2+ years worth of minutes, to be more precise.

It's been a crazy journey to get here. My first game, finally released for sale on Steam!

I had to apply just about everything I know regarding application development as a professional software engineer for over 20 years to build what is practically speaking my own personal game engine for Lambda Enigma.

And I had to learn a bunch of new things, ranging from how to use Blender to how to do Foley art, from how to write a Blender addon to how to write a real-time sound mixer.

Making a new puzzle game is a puzzle in itself.

Anyway, I just clicked the release button for the first time so I'm super excited and I wanted to write this little post.

I hope you enjoy the game! Please let me know what you think and also let me know if you'd be interested in joining live coding streams in which I add features and fix bugs in the real game code live on stream. I've never done that before, but it seems like it could be fun and even possibly, maybe, educational for some of you?

Sincerely,
Dave Sexton

[h2]Workbench[/h2]

• Fixed a small visual glitch in which an externally attached gear was slightly clipping through the inside of a puzzle.
  
• Improved the "Misoriented Gear" tablet puzzle so that calling `rotate` multiple times actually does cause multiple side effects, as the player might expect when experimenting to see how side effects work, despite the fact that their solution is incorrect.
  
• Improved the "Jumbled Gears" tablet puzzle so that its side effects follow the new standard behavior as well.
  
• Improved the "Red Light, Green Light" laser tablet puzzle. Renamed it to "Hyper Activity" and changed it from tuples, which are the gear-focused theme, to lambdas, which are the laser-focused theme.
  
• Patched an unintended solution in the "Splitting Gears" tablet puzzle.
  
• Patched an unintended solution in the "Sliding Gears" tablet puzzle.
  
• Fixed a very rare bug in the tablet puzzle infrastructure that could cause valid code to be misinterpreted as invalid, in one particular scenario.
  
• Suppressed the failure vignette that is briefly displayed after correctly solving the code part of a tablet puzzle while the machine part of the puzzle is still unsolved.
  

[h2]Computer[/h2]

• Removed the fade out effect from an error highlight, while an error message is displayed to the player and a section of the code is error highlighted, so that the correlation cannot be easily missed.