Fun for the long Labor Day weekend -- Viewfinder is 20% off on Steam until September 8:
Challenge perception, redefine reality, and reshape the world around you with an instant camera. Viewfinder is a new single player game offering gamers hours of interesting and fun experiences while uncovering the mysteries left behind. Viewfinder is a mind-bending first person adventure game in which you can bring pictures to life by placing them into the world.
As longtime readers may remember, I started cheerleading for and chatting with Viewfinder indie's developer, Matt Stark, back when it was just a viral demo released during the peak of COVID in 2020:
Above: Original Viewfinder demo
As you might expect, Mark tells me he created this effect for a puzzle game he's working on. "I think the puzzles could be open-ended, allowing the player to approach them creatively," he tells me. "I'm at the stage of brainstorming level mechanics and trying to decide what the anatomy of a puzzle in the game should be.
As for achieving this effect, here's how he does it:
"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.)
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