By Kieron Gillen on August 14th, 2008 at 2:55 pm.
This is a cute one. New developer bobblebrook, as well as working on larger projects, are trying to do a webgame a month. Coign of Vantage is their latest. Despite being impossible to illustrate, it’s enormously simple. Move mouse to spin pixels in 3D space. If you can get them in the position to recreate a set image, you gain more time. It’s outrun with 3D-pixel-weirdness, and well worth a play.
Inevitably, I’m a bit rubbish.
14/08/2008 at 15:09 Jim Rossignol says:
And at playing the game!
14/08/2008 at 15:21 Noc says:
It’s alright. There aren’t as many puzzle elements as I would’ve liked – once you figure out which axis the image is strung out along, you just move your view over to that end. Also, since the required vantage point is on top of an axis as often as not, the rotation controls get a little wonky. Especially considering that it follows whatever the mouse does; even substituting that for a click+drag model would have made it feel a bit more intuitive, I think.
14/08/2008 at 15:36 Theory says:
It gets stupidly easy once you realise that small pixels go near you and big pixels go far away from you. I stopped even looking at the previews at around image 20.
14/08/2008 at 15:37 Mythrilfan says:
Amazingly, there are ways to spoil this game for you. So here goes: a Reddit comment taught me to ‘cheat’ at this game. Ignore the picture, and instead move the smallest squares so that they are closest to your eyes/screen.
14/08/2008 at 16:29 Bobsy says:
Indeed. I’m afraid I got bored of the concept quite a bit before the time ran out. Still, nice concept.
14/08/2008 at 17:25 Lorc says:
This is clever for such a simple idea. Complex-looking, and requiring attention but not terribly difficult. It makes you feel smarter than you really are to complete them.
Does anyone else think it might make for a nifty “hacking” minigame in a system shock 2? Use the game itself as lock, or hide passcodes or “data images” in the pixelcloud. And there’s all sorts of tricks you could pull to add variety or extra layers of difficulty.
Besides, it just /looks/ like some kind of hollywood hacking visualisation.
14/08/2008 at 23:42 icegreentea says:
Thought it was fun. The only thing that kept me from really enjoying it was the control scheme. There were a bunch of times when I knew where/how I wanted to rotate it, but the control scheme just drove me mad. And getting those last few pixels aligned is maddening.
As Noc said, click and drag probably would have worked better.
14/08/2008 at 23:50 Alex says:
It’s fun and has a nice presentation. It’s so simple that it’s not something that I’d keep on playing for extended periods of time, but I think it would work well as a minigame.
15/08/2008 at 12:00 Lollerskater says:
I find it amusing as to how not only the music was based upon the same piece as featured in the 2006 animation “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” but also how visually the game bears a striking resemblance in style to the time travel sequences in that film.
Coincidence? Surely. But a real pleasant one at that.