Watch: Brain-Melting Unity Demo Becoming Reality-Creating Puzzle Game Called Viewfinder

Remember that cerebellum-straining Unity demo by game design student Matt Stark, which enabled a user to create mini-worlds within mini-worlds, simply by "photographing" aspects within them? Matt's now incorporating that feature into an upcoming game he's making, called Viewfinder -- watch some early gameplay above.

Since the effect reminds you a bit of the reality teleporting feature in the adventure-puzzle game classics Portal 1 and 2, you won't be surprised to learn that Viewfinder will also be a puzzle game:

"The project's at an early stage," as Matt puts it to me, "but I'm making short puzzle levels where you overcome various environmental obstacles to reach an objective. From playtesting it seems like a lot of the fun comes from creatively experimenting with the camera."

Follow Matt on Twitter or on YouTube for updates. As for how he's created this effect from a Unity perspective, here's how he and I tried describing that process last month:

"When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment's meshes to make a hole for the photo." 

Or to put it another way, he puts a copy of the world on top of the world, and erases anything that would cause those worlds to overlap, until they're ready to do so. (If you know what I mean, and I'm not even sure I do.)

More here.

Comments

[James Powell]

An original idea is hard to come by these days, and thats.... Crazy cool.

[luca]

how to get download? this game is cool!