Snapshot looks to be a more clever puzzle-platformer than we were worried it might be in our original impression. The GDC build of the game showed off how the camera mechanic could be used both as a glorified inventory system and as a very different way to solve puzzles. This charming game boasts incredibly easy to pick up controls, making the game instantly accessible to anyone who has ever played a platformer before. Not much about this game is written in stone, but it will prove to be a game to watch for as it develops.

The basic premise of the Snapshot is that you can take photos of objects in the world around you. The photos capture items, removing them from the world. Move somewhere else where you need an object, and you can tape it back into the world where you want it. You have a limited number of exposures, but it’s easy to delete irrelevant photos to free up space. If you’ve ever used the Macintosh Grab utility, it should only be a quick hop to this idea. Aside from that, you move an avatar, Pic, through a 2D platformer, solving puzzles by literally inserting solutions into place. The graphics are cartoony and friendly, reminiscent of their inspiration, Yoshi’s Island.

Elephant in pants: hard. Elephant in photo: easy.

While the camera sounds like a basic inventory system—and in many ways it is—the camera mechanic mixes things up a little. You can take a picture of anything on the screen, which includes things you can’t access by walking up to them, like crates behind walls. It includes things like elephants, which any game short of Monkey Island might consider too unwieldy to stuff into your pants. Where the game really caught our eye was at the end of the GDC demo: the last puzzle was to photograph a door and to put it in a new place. This is the sort of move that is sensical when you’re pulling things out of the world with a camera, but not when you’re filling up your bag of holding with struggling wildlife.

When we spoke to Peter Jones, one of the two developers of the game, he highlighted how the camera mechanic also influenced their choice of controls. The Xbox 360 controller was specifically selected even though the game is being made for the PC because holding it feels like a camera (a lot of the buttons are in the same place). Jones said that people walked up to the game with no instruction and just start playing, saying, “Before they even move, they take a picture.” They also put a lot of work into fine tuning the platforming details, trying to get everything down to Pic’s run speed to feel right.

The GDC build of the game only allows for capturing things that are “photogenic” (read: sparkly), but the full game should include the ability to capture anything that isn’t the collision layer (e.g. ground, walls). Jones said that the demo is a proof of concept that began as a thesis project for himself and Kyle Pulver, the other developer. In fact, the GDC build is going to be completely scrapped, because their ideas for the game aren’t feasible using the current software authoring tool.

Sadly for us, Jones was really good
at not saying too much to the press.
Photo by Kate McKiernan

Chatting with Jones at his booth, we talked about possibilities for using this camera mechanic in interesting ways, and it sounds like he and Pulver have done a lot of brainstorming. They had already thought about all the ideas we came up with, including puzzles where you have to capture more than one object in a single exposure, sections that emphasize action-style platforming as wells as puzzle solving and the capacity to photograph Pic to move him around. That last point, while particularly awesome, is particularly difficult because you run into frame of reference problems, but Jones reports that they’ve “come close to something.”

Jones wouldn’t commit to any of those ideas, or suggest new ones we hadn’t thought about yet. He did say that they have ambitious plans to have the game ready for next year’s IGF, which they hope to be able to do by bring a few more people on to the project. While the group has plans to go “under the radar” until more of the game is finalized, we learned that once development really gets underway, they hope to post regularly about it. We’ll be checking in regularly with this game to see how development goes, and updating you here on the site.

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Tags:   GDC · GDC 2009 · platformer · puzzle1 Comment

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