Viewfinder Finally Playable on Steam & PS5 for Brain-Melting Indie Fun

It's been over 3 years since Viewfinder started out as a viral, brain-melting Unity demo, and now it's finally and fully playable on Steam and Playstation 5:

Viewfinder is a mind-bending first person adventure game in which you can bring pictures to life by placing them into the world. It tells the story of the ever changing world, human experience and relationships, meaningful and misguided passion for change, and overcoming loss.

"It's come so far since the demos I posted ages ago," creator Matt Stark told me recently. "There's lots of stuff in the demo I couldn't have even dreamed of us doing back then. At the same time, it feels like the demo is just scratching the surface of all the stuff we've got in the rest of the game."

One particular feature that wasn't in the 2020 demo is fairly dazzling:

When you "fail" -- for instance, falling off a cliff -- instead of dying, you Rewind all of reality, going back in time so you can try again. Maybe another game has done something like this before, but I can't recall.

Another feature that's a favorite of Matt's is picture filters.

"There's one level showing some different art styles using picture filters, and that feature didn't exist at all until about a year into development."

If you're wondering how he pulls off the "pictures alter reality" effect, here's what he told me when the original demo went viral:

"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.  

That process is still roughly the same, but, says Matt, "In a 'ship of Theseus' kind of way. Like we've replaced or reworked a lot of the individual pieces of the process and we've had to adapt it to work with various other features -- like it's all had to be adapted to work with rewinding.

More details and info on the publisher's page. I'm intrigued by the storyline and characters, and I'm curious how those will interact with the gameplay mechanics. Also a good illustration of just how challenging indie game development is: Even in ideal circumstances where an early game demo gets enormous virality, it'll still take several years before seeing a wide release.

If you're wondering how he pulls off the "pictures alter reality" effect, here's what he told me when the original demo went viral:

"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.  

That process is still roughly the same, but, says Matt, "In a 'ship of Theseus' kind of way. Like we've replaced or reworked a lot of the individual pieces of the process and we've had to adapt it to work with various other features -- like it's all had to be adapted to work with rewinding.

More details and info on the publisher's page. I'm intrigued by the storyline and characters, and I'm curious how those will interact with the gameplay mechanics. Also a good illustration of just how challenging indie game development is: Even in ideal circumstances where an early game demo gets enormous virality, it'll still take several years before seeing a wide release.