This prototype may require a bit of backstory, as it is based on the excellent game Noita developed by Nolla games. Noita is known for its many secrets found throughout the game. The eye messages are one of the two major secrets. It consists of a series of messages spelled out using eye symbols, hidden in hard to reach places of the game. As of yet, their entire meaning is unknown (though certain patterns have been found!), even though some very well practiced cryptographers have tried all sorts of analyses over the past years.
In january, there was a lot of activity surrounding the eyes, as someone had come forward claiming they had solved the messages. Said person had decided that rather than to reveal the solution, they wanted to make a sort of ARG out of it where cryptic clues would lead to the solution. This caused a lot of commotion as people tried to figure out the clues and became increasingly sceptical there even was a solution. Ultimately they never showed the solution or proof they had solved it at all, but it at least sparked some new theories.
I made this prototype as a sort of joke during this time about making our own eye messages to solve. It is a variation of the many well known "bubble shooter" games that uses the assets of Noita as a basis. Though I never finished the gameplay loop, the graphics were similar enough to the original game to make people assume the footage was of the original game.
Shooting your wand will place an eye where the bolt hits. If more than 3 eyes are connected, all these eyes and any eyes that would be disconnected turn into gold. The logic behind how this is done is pretty interesting. Depth first search is first used to detect and queue (in order to animate gold spawning) deletion. Then DFS is done from all eyes in the top row to find which eyes are connected. Eyes not in this set are removed.
Recreating the graphics from Noita came with a few peculiarities. Importing the sprites and the background parallax were fairly straightforward. However, or many of it's particle effects, Noita uses particle emitters that use a special emissionsprite to control how the particles are spawned. One colour channel of this sprite holds the density of the particles, and a second channel holds the time at which they should spawn. Godot does have emmision shapes, but these do not have the time component. Therefore I had to get creative and modify particle shader code to do this. What made things more difficult is that godot bakes emmission shapes into a look up texture where each pixel stores a position in which to spawn a particle. These are normally automatically generated, so I had to write a Tool script to generate these textures from scratch to include the time based spawning. It converts an emitter into a lookup table like so:
The tool script samples one of the emissionsprite at a random position, and adds it with a certain chance based on the density value in the emmision sprite. After sampling a certain amount of pixels, the emmisionsprite is sampled again, but now at the coordinates that were previously sampled to get the time at which the particle is to be spawned. This allows sorting the positions into a texture based on the time at which they should spawn. In the particle shader, the pixels can then be spawned at positions in the order in which they appear in the lookup texture. The result is as follows:
Another challenge to replicate was the gold chunks. The original game uses a texture with normals in the R and G channels to make the surfaces look metallic. There is also a "bar" of light that quickly moves across the gold to give an additional "blink". Together with some particle effects, it looks something like this: