Science for all, fun above all
Developing a metroidvania inevitably brings speedrunning into the picture. While we were building Exographer, we knew some players would be tempted to speedrun it. We even left a few “design flaws” here and there for them, especially regarding the gluonic boots. Our next game, still in the works, won’t be anything like a metroidvania, but…
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It’s summer — the perfect time to load up some games on our Steam Decks and Switches. Good news: Exographer is fully verified for both devices. But what does it really take for a game to run well on small screens and modest processors? Not much, at least for a 2D game, if you’ve kept…
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Exographer is primarily focused on its gameplay mechanics (see devlog #6), and its storyline emerged after all the design was essentially complete. Most of the text is used to solve puzzles, and it is revealed through the pages of a notebook to be decoded. To contextualize the information, each notebook entry is signed and dated…
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In Exographer, two types of character were to be distinguished: the Natitans, repositories of knowledge and inspired by real scientists who discovered elementary particles (see devlog #4), and Ini, the player character, an exographer sent to investigate a mysterious distress signal emitted by the Natitans. Ini’s design had to be completely different from that of…
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Exographer’s music was scored by Yann van der Cruyssen, author of the Stray and Seasons after Fall soundtracks, among others. Yann confesses that producing a soundtrack for a game with retro graphics is always a tricky business. The sound has to be neither too old school nor too modern. In fact, this isn’t the first…
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In Exographer, you’ll spend a (small) part of your time searching for new elementary particles in images closely resembling those manipulated by physicists at CERN or elsewhere. And you don’t even need any prior knowledge! The game is designed to help you gradually get to grips with these seemingly complex concepts. In the example above,…
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To repair the giant machines of the Exographer world, you’ll have to solve puzzles. To design them, our game designer Pierre-Alban Ferrer had to meet various design objectives: simple or advanced learning of a power (see devlog #3), checking players’ skills, using the camera, illustrating mechanics specific to science… Puzzles based on ray redirection, for…
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In Exographer, your enemies are four materials with strange properties. One of our challenges was to represent these so-called « absurd » materials. Inherent to the gameplay, they block progress, and some are even deadly! Progressive mastery of the powers (see Devlog #3) enables you to overcome them. To ensure that they conveyed the right visual message,…
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In Exographer, you follow in the footsteps of nine enigmatic academics from a forgotten civilisation. These ‘Natitans’ once built colossal machines to discover the inner structure of matter… But they all seem to have disappeared, leaving behind a kind of testament. Like absolutely everything else in the game, these characters are directly inspired by science.…
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In Exographer, the character acquires powers that are directly inspired by the interactions between elementary particles. This key element of the game is also a major design challenge, which can be summed up as follows: How do you create a fun experience while staying true to the science? The first step was to gather as…
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