Gearplexed news & patch notes

Gearplexed will be launching soon, so now seems like a good time to give you a couple little tips to help jump-start your full version play-through. You can try these out in the demo right now too.

Chain Dismantle

When you dismantle a gear, continue holding the right mouse button and sweep the cursor over other gears you want to dismantle. You will collect all the gears on that layer for quick and precise dismantling of entire gear trains.

Chests and Machines

Did you know you can connect top gears on chests and machines? Generally, if you see a hole in something that is similar to the hole on bottom gears, there’s a good chance you can snap a top gear to it.

RPM Hint

On levels where speed matters, you can hold any gear up to another for a short time and you will be able to see the RPM (Rotations Per Minute) appear below the cursor. No need to tediously place it, drop your gear, then check the tooltip. This hint is not present in every level though, only the ones where you also see the RPM in the tooltip.

Item Interaction

You don’t have to just watch helplessly as items pile up, you can use the cursor to bump them around.

Hope this helps. Enjoy!

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4292020/discussions/0/

The last devlog wrapped up the core design of Gearplexed, so now what? I haven’t updated for a while, and I’m told I need to provide some type of regular update so people know the developer wasn’t squished by a meteorite or something. (I wasn’t, by the way)

For this short devlog I’m going to talk a little about a design feature that, if I did my job right, nobody will notice, including the people the feature is for. Approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of females have some form of colorblindness. That’s nearly 1 in 12 of you guys, and I want to make sure you can enjoy Gearplexed the same way as anyone else.

The game looks different for different people.

Without going into too much detail, I have a decent amount of professional experience with writing publications and presentations. It only made sense to pull those standards into my game dev hobby. Typically, with any visually heavy medium, you don’t want to rely on color alone to convey differences between elements. You want to vary at least two things. Ideally, altering the element’s silhouette in addition to color, but if that is not possible (for example, when you’re building a gear and need feedback about whether you can place it there) using a color scale varies the value and especially avoids requiring distinction between red and green. Visual design elements are regularly checked by taking a screenshot and using a paint program (such as GIMP) to convert to greyscale and check if any information was lost, then make changes as needed. For my larger projects my debugging suite has a filter that converts the game to greyscale for more interactive Q/A, because the utility of examining the game in greyscale goes beyond simply accommodating perceptual differences and helps elevate the overall visual presentation for everyone.

If you have any form of colorblindness and didn’t give a second thought to anything in Gearplexed, that tells me I did my job right. If you do have trouble with anything though, certainly let me know in this game’s discussion forums. This will be my last devlog because the game is launching soon. I will continue supporting Gearplexed (and the demo) so stay tuned!

This is a small patch that fixes a couple minor issues below:

Full v1.0.1 / Demo v2.0.4

• Fixed a minor issue that if you continue holding the mouse button after building a gear it still shows as place-able. Not a problem per se, but it made the game feel a bit janky.

v1.0.1 only

• It was previously unclear that you received more than one wheel when collecting the bonus in level 7-3. A token was added to tell you how many wheels you get.

• Fixed a couple of other minor issues with colliders, artwork, and sounds.

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4292020/discussions/0/

I stumbled on to a bug yesterday where if you quit a level while a gear train is seized, that annoying 'gear-train-seized' sound effect continues playing into the main menu. It is now fixed.

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4292020/discussions/0/

Welcome to part 2 of game design. In Part 1 I talked a little bit about some of the overarching design philosophies in Gearplexed. Today I'm going to get a little more into the technical side of the game design.

Game Design Part 2

What gear ratios to use? How are gear ratios made? How do we keep the game from turning into math homework? If you’ve played Gearplexed, you probably didn’t even give a second thought to these things. However, at the beginning of development, these were all open questions.

Starting with the basics, gear ratios are made when two gears of different sizes are engaged together. The ratio of the gears’ teeth (or more precisely, the effective circumference) determines the gear ratio. For example, if a large gear with 32 teeth is paired with a small gear of 16 teeth, every time the large gear spins once, the small gear spins twice, doubling the speed (and also halving the torque). The linear motion is always conserved though, so if the target gear is the same size as the source gear, it doesn’t matter what sizes of gears are used in between, the source and target will spin at the same speed. When you co-locate those two gears on the same shaft (achieved in Gearplexed by stacking one gear on top of another), they both spin at the same speed, but now the linear motion of the larger gear is double the smaller gear, and any gears engaged with it will inherit that new speed.

Linear motion is conserved through a flat gear train. Stacking gears will change the speed.

Should there be a limit on how many gears we can stack? If not, the risk of making a situation where a gear gets hidden or things become nonsensical is pretty high. I’m a fan of “keep It stupid simple”, so if the minimum number of layers needed to make a gear ratio is two, then that is the total number of layers that should be available to build with. In order to ensure nothing gets hidden under anything else, all gears on the top layer are open-work, and all gears on the bottom layer are solid. Limiting the layers not only makes things easy to keep track of, it also creates an emergent mechanic of space management.

Keeping the math as simple as possible seemed like a good idea. Keeping everything to whole numbers is ideal. Using gear sizes of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 means that any speed or torque, so long as it is a multiple of 12 generally yields whole numbers for the resulting speed or torque no matter what combination of gears is used. The size, by the way, is given instead of teeth because the different themes have different numbers of teeth – the sizes are number of teeth on a gear divided by the number of teeth on the smallest gear (which is actually a wheel, but I digress). As a side note, if you observe the artwork closely, the size of the gear is embedded in several features making up the gear, so you can determine a gear’s size at a glance without having to resort to a tool-tip.

The artwork for each gear also gives hints to the size.

Now let’s visit an issue that came up mid-development: serial gear ratios. With 5 sizes of gears and wheels, not including 1:1 ratios, there’s 10 unique gear ratios that can be made. A series of 2 gears therefore has 10² or 100 possible ratios. A series of 3 gears yields 10³ or 1,000 possible combinations. Most people can easily discard 70-80% of these through simple observation, but that still leaves a lot of things to try. I made a couple levels that needed 3 ratios in series, and testing a few months later after forgetting the solution made me frustrated enough to delete those levels.

Perhaps there’s a reason there’s so few gear-based puzzle games out there…

Video games can be challenging, but they also should be fun. Serial gear ratios are not fun, they’re math homework (and not even the fun kind of math homework). Gearplexed has plenty of other levers for ramping the difficulty besides gear ratios, so I leaned into those: making levels larger, weaving gears through obstacles, limiting gears, randomized gear offerings, and a form of player driven time-pressure (e.g. ‘Criss-Cross’, level 5-4 or Demo 9). Then there’s my personal favorite, factory levels. Factory levels give a nice mental break from the normal gameplay by eliminating the need to make exacting gear ratios, but still benefiting from them. They also give belts a second in-game purpose. The casual character of Gearplexed enables absurd factory concepts such as making numbers in ‘Numbers Game’ (level 5-8) and powering the sun to grow corn in ‘Corny Crafting’ (level 6-8). There’s still a few serial gear ratios called for, but they’re limited and often built up in steps (such as in ‘Remember These Steps’, level 5-5 or Demo 10) so you know you’re on the right track.

Gearplexed is fundamentally more a game about problem solving than making gear ratios. You won’t have to do any math (unless you want to), and I’m sure you will find levels you love, levels you hate, and levels that make you question the developer’s sanity. You might even learn a little something along the way. If you enjoy playing with gears, you will enjoy playing Gearplexed. This post concludes the core game design devlogs. Thank you for reading!

More from the Gearplexed Core Devlog series:

Devlog #1: Where did Gearplexed come from?

Devlog #2: Game Design Part 1

Devlog #3: Art Design

In this devlog I’m going to talk about one my favorite parts of game design, both as a player and a developer: Artwork! I’ve been interested in computer graphics (CG) for about 30 years. For a time, I actually considered, and trained for a career in movie special effects, but ultimately decided on a different path for career stability. However, keeping CG a hobby purely on its own was somewhat difficult. It is difficult for me to just sit down and make a piece of artwork without some inspiration or purpose. Incidentally, making my own video games turned out to be a perfect outlet. It’s a way of giving myself small, bite sized assignments. Often of things I wouldn’t otherwise do that push me out of my comfort zone.

At the risk of stating the obvious, video games need a lot of artwork (a lot!). For Gearplexed, I settled on a no-outline 2D toon style because it best reinforced the game’s casual personality, and wouldn’t require a lot of time-consuming detail work. I originally considered a hybrid approach, where I would obtain 3rd party assets for the one-off pieces such as animals, vehicles, and buildings that would build the one-note stories (discussed in Periodic Devlog #2). Then I would match the assets’ art style for the gears, racks, and wheels, which I would do myself. I spent a few weeks browsing through 3rd party assets for the artwork I needed, but no one creator made everything I needed, and trying to get a consistent art style across multiple creators wasn’t happening. I also considered AI renderings, briefly, but the results tend to be less than inspired.* In the end I decided to cut the one-note stories and do 100% of the artwork myself.

All this for one gear… There’s about 300 original pieces of artwork tailor-made for Gearplexed, each with several maps and layers for dynamic effects.

Gearplexed was an opportunity to try out Unity’s dynamic 2D lighting. Early experiments with it looked great, and I immediately decided that was the way to go. Although dynamic 2D lighting requires every sprite to have two secondary maps, fewer sprites are needed overall because there is no need to make sprites for different lighting scenarios (i.e. rotations). For example, there is only 3 sprites for the pipes – straight, bend, and tee, but I could combine them in different ways and even made an entire level environment exclusively out of these 3 pipe sprites. To get even more mileage out of each sprite, I used a bland, grayish color palette, and then tinted them different colors in-game to achieve different looks. When combined with different lighting angles and styles in each level, the possible combinations grew exponentially. The result is 72 levels that each look distinct from one-another with just 74 unique pieces of artwork.

The most expensive decision was to have three different themes. Originally I wanted to do five themes, but after spending four months on the first two, I cut the total down to three distinct themes that could each be roughly associated with the different puzzle styles (i.e. movement, speed, torque). I feel like the effort was well placed, because it is a game about gears after all, so there should be a lot of gears to look at. The overall aesthetic naturally settled into a type of steampunk (though not as intricate as typical steampunk). I leaned into the steampunk style for chests and crafting machines, where I incorporated other mechanisms such as reversing gears and Geneva drives that serve as diegetic progress indicators.

What is conspicuously absent is stylized backgrounds. This isn’t because I got lazy, it is because Gearplexed is already a visually busy game with two layers to think about. Any pattern at all in the background turns it into a visual cacophony. As such, that puts more pressure on the foreground and middle ground to create visual interest. I feel I could have done better on the environments, but Gearplexed is not a game about exploring an environment, it is a game about gears. As developers we have finite resources and as such must prioritize our efforts where they have the most impact, which in this case was the gears, wheels, and belts.

Gearplexed was my first attempt at making intentionally non-realistic artwork. I think it turned out pretty well, and I learned a lot in the process. That’s all for this devlog, next time I'll cover part 2 of the game design. Thanks for reading!

*Edit: That decision was made well over a year ago. Now I'm really glad I didn't use any Gen AI, because this year has seen a huge swell in abhorrence towards those tools.

More from the Gearplexed Core Devlog series:

Devlog #1: Where did Gearplexed come from?

Devlog #2: Game Design Part 1

Devlog #4: Game Design Part 2

The patch adds some polish to the UI. Here are a couple highlights

• The escape menu is now accessible at any point during level transitions (previously only accessible during play).

• Auxiliary UI elements (tooltip and dismantle timer) are updated with new artwork.

• The level introduction screen now contains some hints to the level mechanics.

• A few other minor tweaks, detailed in the changelog.

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4292020/discussions/0/

The patch fixes a few minor issues:

• Added a tutorial for Demo 3 to clarify the mechanics of Random Chests.

• Improved readability of tooltips. The row order is consistent across all entities, and it is more difficult to confuse different spinner types.

• Resolved an issue that caused the level transition screen to advance if the mouse button is held down at the end of a level.

• Adjusted collider size on trusses in Demo 10 to more closely match the artwork.

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4292020/discussions/0/

Hello again! I thought it was about time to provide a status update. I recently updated the trailer and screenshots to reflect the polishing work I’ve been doing the past couple months. In this devlog I’m going to go into a little detail about Gearplexed’s game design.

Status Updates

• Demo 2.0 is released, I hope you are enjoying it.

• Gearplexed is registered for Steam’s Next Fest in June.

• The final artwork pass is complete. Some levels got a light touch, others got a complete makeover, and a few levels were completely redone from scratch. The next step is to add Steam Achievements. As of this writing I have 12 achievements in mind, which run the gamut from gimmes to major challenges.

• I’ve narrowed the release date down to a three-week window in late July, and I plan to announce the specific day late June/early July.

Game Design Part 1

I’ve divided this devlog into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the general game design philosophy of Gearplexed, while part 2 will get a little more into the technical side. As I mentioned in the last devlog, there aren’t a lot of gear-based puzzle games out there. That gives it a high score on novelty, but also gives very little reference for where to start with such a game and what features a gear-based game would need to be engaging and fun. Considering that I’ve been dabbling in making factory games for years, it was tempting to go in that direction. But factory games are a beast to make, and being my first public release, I wanted to limit the scope to one game mechanic which is explored thoroughly.

Any game needs goals and progression to make it into a game, otherwise it’s just a sandbox. I remember seeing a snippet about Nintendo’s "WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!" (2003) on YouTube some time ago and was intrigued by the idea of each screen being a completely different game. The early design of Gearplexed saw each level as a unique gear-based puzzle scenario with what I had termed as a, “one-note story” that would be used to explore different mechanics and playstyles. For example, you might pump water to a town using a specific rotational speed, let a cat out of a castle by operating a rack, keep a vehicle running using randomly generated gears almost like a variant of Tetris, build a micro-factory, etc.

It’s not particularly hard to come up with 10-20 of these scenarios, but coming up with 50-100 such scenarios proved to be a significant creative burden. Not to mention each level would require a major, one-off art project. Early testing with placeholder goals taught me that building the gear trains and getting everything spinning in the right direction and at the right speed was more challenging than expected, but also where all the fun of playing was.

At best, the one-note stories added little more to the game than background noise. At worst, they over-constrained the puzzle design. I distilled the design down to several abstract puzzle styles that retained the spirit and variety of the one-note stories: simple spinner levels, rack puzzles, chest that provide random elements, operate a micro-factory, etc., which are cycled in an 8-level structure.

The story placeholders used in early alpha builds turned into the spinners that are in the final version. I made these spinners visually interesting by using a planetary gear set that serves as both a progress indicator and as a hint for how fast it needs to turn (if relevant), then gave them a nice satisfying completion sound. There are a few exceptions, making an interesting to play puzzle always comes first. Then if there happens to be a little scenario that can be made from it without a huge amount of extra effort, I went for it. However, most of the game remains as abstract puzzles.

What gear ratios to use? How are gear ratios made? How do we prevent the game from turning into math homework? I’ll plan to talk about these design decisions in Game Design Part 2. Thank you for reading!

More from the Gearplexed Core Devlog series:

Devlog #1: Where did Gearplexed come from?

Devlog #3: Art Design

Devlog #4: Game Design Part 2

This is a major update that affects nearly every part of the demo. Here’s the summary of what’s changed:

• 3 New demo levels! The demo seemed a bit short, so I added three levels including two, more substantial ‘Puzzling’ levels from mid-game. If you already finished demo version 1, you will be able to continue with the new demo levels 8-10.

Syncing the demo with the full version:

• Finishing touches on the artwork, including a second pass on the level artwork and animating some of the decorations to give the environments a bit of life.

• A few new discoverables/secrets.  Nothing game-changing, just a few trinkets that you may find here and there to make the gameplay more layered and interesting.

• The Options dialog now follows a more typical, and flexible, tabbed style instead of cluttered all into one window. The “Defaults” button only affects the currently active tab so you can reset a group of options (e.g. the sound mixer) to defaults without affecting other settings.

• A few minor UX updates and bug fixes.

Enjoy! And of course, if you run into any bugs/technical issues please report them in the Bugs and Technical Issues subforum in Gearplexed’s community hub.

Hello! The Gearplexed store page has been up for a month as of this writing, and I thought it would be a good idea to provide a little update and background for anyone interested.

Status Update

Gearplexed full version is very close to finished. All 72 levels have been through at least three design iterations. I’m currently working hard to complete the fourth and final design iteration, which involves adding the finishing touches to the level environments and refining the game-play. Then, I need to work on every indie dev’s “favorite” thing, marketing! I make games I personally want to play yet don’t exist. But what is the point of making a game if you don’t share?

About Gearplexed

The Drawing Board, literally. Not the best sketch artist, but enough to keep track of ideas.

I have been dabbling in game design for the past nine years, even longer if you count the custom artwork I made for Sim City 2000 (Maxis, 1993) and custom campaigns I used to make Starcraft (Blizzard, 1998). I am a mechanical engineer by trade, but I also enjoy making computer graphics artwork. Game design happens to be convenient creative outlet that combines both these skills. Not including Gearplexed, I have three major game ideas that I’ve worked on to various degrees. Prior to this project, I had spent two years gaining a lot of traction on a factory-type game, but a video on YouTube suggested to NOT release a passion project as a first game. Instead build and release small, limited-scope game just to learn how to sell a game on Steam and actually finish a project.

Gearplexed combines two concepts I had been toying with: A level-based game inspired by the structure and personality of one of my favorite childhood games, Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991), and a mechanical power transmission mechanic I wanted to include in either my factory or city builder game, but couldn’t incorporate effectively.

There didn’t seem to be that many gear-based puzzle games, and none similar to my idea. I wanted to make a 2D puzzle game about building with gears that would be interesting to play, while having at least some educational value. Since I already spent years developing and fine-tuning construction, crafting, inventory, and entity interaction mechanics with my other games, I could simply transfer those. The only major mechanic I had to make specifically for Gearplexed was the gear motion solver. Therefore, the majority of my time was spent on game design, level design, and artwork.

I had expected Gearplexed to take 4 months to complete. As of this writing I’ve spent 14 months on it. However, it has exceeded my expectations in more ways than one. Building a game by yourself is a phenomenal amount of work, but it’s also been a lot of fun and something I’ve always wanted to do.

I’ll leave it there for now. In future devlogs I plan to elaborate a bit on certain design decisions, unique challenges, or problems solved. I’ll try to put something out once or twice a month prior to release, but I don’t want to take time away from the most important part, which is making the game. If there is anything you have a question about let me know. I may end up making a devlog about it!

More from the Gearplexed Core Devlog series:

Devlog #2: Game Design Part 1

Devlog #3: Art Design

Devlog #4: Game Design Part 2

The patch fixes a few minor issues:

• The level numbering no longer refers to the level numbers from the full version and instead uses its own number system (i.e. 1-7). This should help reduce confusion due to mismatched level numbers between the demo and full version.

• Added balancing to random chests. Previously they were purely random. Now they check against the base probability and re-roll if the disbursed items get too out of sync with what they are supposed to be disbursing. This will provide a more consistent experience on levels with random chests.

• Minor tweaks to tutorials.

• Upgraded Unity Editor version to 6000.3.9f1

If you experience any bugs please report them in the "Bugs and Technical Issues" subforum of the community hub.