As some of you know, we had been looking for someone to port Osmos to Linux. But in the end, after mulling it over for a while (and a couple nice offers from experienced Linux folk), our very own Dave Burke has decided to tackle the port himself! Who knew he was such a masochist?
Anyways, Dave has reported back that after some initial head-banging on installation and configuration (he’s started with Ubuntu), things are progressing really well. Hooray for cross-platform libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/vorbis, etc. and well abstracted code!
He even promised a screen shot a few days ago and — lo and behold! — just delivered:
What’s more, he says he’ll be ready for some external testing by next week! So it looks like the wait is nearly over for all you Linux users.
In the meantime, let us know (by email or on the forum) if you’re interested in early “alpha” testing or participating in the closed beta.
Another GDC has come and gone. (sigh.) I could go on about it, and how great it was to see friends new and old, but that’s what Facebook is for. So without further ado, here are the slides from our Independent Game Summit talk on minimalist game design and Osmos.
For those of you with access to the GDC vault, you can watch the video of the full talk here. For those who don’t, I should mention that the first half of our talk consisted mostly of live demos and prototypes, with very few slides. Many of the slides that appear here weren’t shown, and are a brief overview of what was said during those demos. That said, Andy’s great “Nutty Professor” slides (from the second half of the talk) are here: including his theories on economy and coherence, abstraction and palette breadth, and everyone’s favorite slide overlaying games on McCloud’s “Picture Plane.”
As always, feel free to comment below if you have any questions for us.
Has it only been four seasons since last GDC? Hard to believe - it seems like so much has happened since then! Anyways, we’re taking off for San Francisco tomorrow. Andy and I will be giving a talk on Wednesday about Osmos and game design minimalism. (We’ll post the slides after GDC.) Besides that, just looking forward to a great week of meeting up with friends, soaking up buckets of game dev ideas and wisdom, and generally enjoying the west-coast San Francisco scene.
Many fans have requested it, and here it is — brought to you by Peter Kirn, the man behind the most excellent Create Digital Music website.
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It’s an extended, free soundtrack, featuring full tracks from Loscil, Gas 0095, Julien Neto, High Skies and more, running 50 minutes in total. The .m4a version also includes chapter markers and visuals (screenshots).
What more can we say, except enjoy! And a big thank you to Peter and all the artists who graciously allowed us to release this mix of their wonderful ambient music.
Have we got a deal for you! This Valentine’s we’re banding together with five other independent developers to bring you a sweet bundle of Indie Love. It’s an $85 value for only $20!! The games are:
And Yet It Moves, by Broken Rules
Auditorium, by Cipher Prime
Aztaka, by Citeremis
Eufloria, by Omni Systems
Machinarium, by Amanita Design
Osmos, by Hemisphere Games
We’ve crafted our games with a lot of love and passion and this Valentine’s Day we thought we would put all our love in one place. Give this amazing indie bundle to your valentine or treat yourself to some delicious gaming goodness! It really has been a group effort and we are trying our absolute best to give you the same well-known price point you’ve come to expect from the big distributers. This time, we’re throwing the sale ourselves and all your purchases will go directly to the great indie teams who made these games.
Hell, even we bought it!
So what are you waiting for? Buy The Indie Love Bundle today. Sale ends on Friday, February 19th.
Enjoy, and happy Valentine’s,
- Hemi team and friends
For those of you making an “Osmos Rage!” video: go away, this post ain’t for you, ya big sissies. But for those who are interested in beating those last few levels in the main game, read on.
Given the Achievement stats on Steam, it’s pretty clear that the last few Force levels are where people are really getting stuck. In particular, F3A-3 and F3C-3. (F3A-2 is a fair bit easier since version 1.6.0.) So let’s dive right in. (Now might be a good time to make a pot of tea.)
F3A-3
Zen Attractors 3 is all about efficient orbit manipulation. For those interested in some deeper reading on the subject, start here and here, paying attention to Hohmann transfers in particular. But I’ll present enough material here to get you transferring Osmos orbits with the best of them. (Strangely, I was unable to find an easy to understand “how to efficiently manipulate your obit” tutorial on the web. I guess it doesn’t come up very often in everyday life.)
Take a look at the leftmost image in the diagram below. (Click any image for a larger version.) The red circle is an Attractor, the blue circle is you, and the green circle is your target. Both you and your target are moving in a circular, counter-clockwise orbit. Note that because your orbit is closer to the Attractor, it takes less time to come full circle than for your target.
The first step is for you to speed up to grow your orbit (by clicking behind your mote a few times), as in the middle image. You are now in an elliptical orbit that intersects your target’s orbit. Note that your new elliptical orbit shares a point with your old circular one, and you will continue to return to the point where you “made your move” (ie. clicked to fire mass). Now it’s just a matter of time. You may not come close to hitting your target in your first trip around the Attractor, but if you wait a while, you will. And when you get close, a few judicious clicks should be enough to catch your target. Remember you can warp time: speed it up if you’re waiting for a good fly-by opportunity, and slow it down when you’re close and want time to think and perform micro-adjustments. That’s the basic recipe!
Here’s a video example for good measure. (About two-and-a-half minutes to complete the level. Watch in fullscreen.)
For completeness, the rightmost image above shows how to complete a Hohmann transfer (ie. moving from one circular orbit to another). By speeding up again when reaching the apoapsis (the “far end” of your orbit’s ellipse), you can grow your orbit to the new, larger circle. Again, note that you will continue to return to the last point where you adjusted your speed. (And you will no longer return to a point on your original, smaller circular orbit.)
To shrink your orbit, simply do the reverse: slow down to go from diagram 3 to 2, and slow down again to go from 2 to 1.
Note that you can make these adjustments anywhere in your orbit, but it’s most instructive to view them in this way. Experiment away!
F3C-3
Once you find Zen Attractors 3 easy, it’s time to tackle Epicycles 3. The first thing to practice is efficient orbit escapes and how to fall back into orbit around an outer-Attractor. This is what the tutorial level F3C-1 is for. Practice moving from Attractor to Attractor, and watch how clicking affects your epicyclic orbit. Once you get a good feel for this, you should be able to put all your skills together and beat F3C-3.
Personally, I prefer to visit each of the three outer-Attractors in turn, absorbing their satellites, then absorbing an outer-Attractor, and finally moving into the central Attractor’s orbit to absorb its satellites and finally the Attractor itself. Any remaining outer-Attractors will then leave the “blobiverse” due to their inertia and be absorbed by the red, circular border. But there are multiple ways to do it. A good discussion on strategies can be found on the Steam forums here.
Here’s a video example of how to do it. (It’s over seven minutes long. Refill that teacup and watch in fullscreen.)
As was wisely pointed out by pez0 on the Steam forum: “Think before scooping up the orbiting attractors! If you come from behind in orbit, they’ll accelerate you forward really hard, causing your orbit to expand and you to crash into the wall. This is because gravity isn’t mutual - you accelerate but the attractor does not. Momentum is not conserved so don’t be afraid to dump huge amounts of mass into the attractor to slow yourself down as you’re pulled into the gravity well. You’ll get the mass back immediately when you absorb the attractor, but you’ll retain the change in momentum.” It’s true; in these levels, Attractors’ velocity is not affected by satellites, including you, so momentum is not conserved. Without this physical “cheat” in the game’s design, the Epicycle levels wouldn’t be stable enough to play. So include that technique in your arsenal. I actually use it in the video around 6:19 to slow down as I’m absorbing the first Attractor. (Though it’s hard to make out since I’m firing mass right into the Attractor.) Thanks pez0!
One final note. All levels in their default form are winnable — randomization is never necessary. It’s true, if you randomize enough you may get a particularly easy configuration, but I don’t recommend this strategy. The randomization feature is there to offer players variety, not luck.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the end of our “Osmos Rage” series. Hopefully all this helps you really enjoy the final stages of the game — that’s why we made them in the first place! And who knows… maybe people will even learn something along the way.
Except you video makers out there. You guys’ll never amount to nuthin’!
Welcome to part 3/4 of our “Osmos Rage” series. We introduced the topic in part 1, announced a video contest in part 2, and today we explain why the game gets “so bloody hard” in the end.
Believe it or not, our primary motives were a) truth and b) respect.
Truth: to the game concept and the scientific principles that underlie it. We could have easily made an easier game. In fact, I am 100% certain Osmos would have received better reviews and a better Metacritic rating if we had done so. For the most part, reviewers and gamers alike really appreciated the concept, execution and ambiance of the game, but a common complaint was the difficulty in the late stages. We could have simply removed those late stages, but there are some beautiful mathematical and physical principles that only emerge in them: subtleties of momentum transfer, efficiency, and in particular orbital mechanics. Players can “brute force” their way through most of the easier levels, but not these. In these, the player is forced to really understand the systems at work, and how to be efficient in them. These are some of my favorite levels in the game, and I feel we would have done a disservice to the concepts and to players by leaving them out.
Respect: for players and their time. Levels in Osmos are procedurally generated, so it would have been trivial for us to add more. We could have stretched the game out with a much smoother difficulty curve; It would have forced players to spend more time building their skills, but the game would have also felt more repetitive. We wanted each level to feel distinct, in concept or at least in difficulty. As an “adult gamer”, I don’t have the time nor inclination for grinding anymore. One of the things I really appreciated about Braid is its lack of filler — it had been reduced to the essential experience. I wanted Osmos to do the same.
And when I see reviews like this, it all feels worth it.
Somewhere between completely loathing the difficulty of the last level and finishing the game, I finally “got” Osmos. You see, Osmos was able to do what no other zen (or ambient) game has actually made me do—chill out. Osmos has made me contemplate the very essence of human existence, evolution, consumption, and so much more. The difficulty of Osmos’ later levels was very frustrating at first, and often caused me to quit the game rather angrily; I was approaching Osmos like I would any other game, swiftly trying to complete all given goals in the pursuit of completion. Once I started approaching Osmos as not a game, but as an experience, I was able to fully appreciate the genius behind it. - Dan Carew, Blast Magazine
We even got this praise from Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid.
The result, by the time you’ve finished, is not merely a satisfying game. It rings with that faint and distant sound of truth: because the game is based around laws of physics, it immerses you in these and you learn something about them. Perhaps not anything you didn’t already know in an abstract intellectual way, if you took physics classes in school; but here, you get a feel for them, so they become more real, more tangible. This game can change your perspective.
All that said, people may still criticize our presentation of Osmos as an “ambient” game. My honest opinion is: it’s mostly ambient, but not entirely. Our focus throughout was on gameplay. Yes, we put a lot of love, time and importance into the mood, visuals and sound; but when we discovered level types that really worked well with the fundamental mechanics of Osmos, we included them, even if it meant breaking the ambient rule somewhat. In the end, Osmos is a tricky game to summarily describe, and since it’s mostly relaxed, we kept the tag. For thoroughness, here’s a detailed breakdown by level type:
One third of the levels are in the game’s “Ambient” branch, and I believe these easily qualify.
The “Sentient” levels, however, are not. They’re fun, and they’re many people’s favorite level type; but given the time pressure imposed by the AI opponents, they aren’t really relaxed — the player needs to click too quickly and too often. (Though slowing down time makes things much less frenetic.)
The “Force” branch is a mixed bag. I find that once one understands how to navigate in these systems, the “Zen Attractor” and “Epicycle” levels truly are zen; patience and judicious clicking is the way to play and win these levels. “Warped Chaos” levels on the other hand are not relaxed; players need to move quickly at the start to gather as much mass as possible. However, once these levels stabilize, it becomes more like a slow, warped billiards game than anything else, which is quite ambient.
Finally, we included a number of features in Osmos that give the player a great deal of control over the difficulty and progression.
Time Warping: This allows the player to control the speed of the game, giving them enough time to think and click wisely. It’s a form of user-controlled DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment). It also allows players to speed up time to avoid long waits, or to increase the difficulty for the hardcore.
Randomization: Instead of including more levels and potentially creating too shallow a difficulty curve, we included this feature. Players who are looking for more in-between levels need look no further. If you’re frustrated on a level you can’t beat, go back one level and play some random variants. You’ll enjoy it a lot more while still building your skills. Try to do those variants as efficiently as possible; before long, you’ll be able to return to that “impossible” level, and probably beat it.
Hopefully this helps people understand the rationale behind the difficulty of Osmos’s later levels; and perhaps you’ve found this view on our design decisions interesting. We stand by them, though we’re always open to constructive criticism. Actually, no… wait… screw “constructive” and hold on to that rage! We need videos!! Tortured, infuriated, death-metal videos! We’re bad, bad people. Throw rocks at us. We deserve it.
