He stated that a lack of experience cost him a year or two of development time, and the development time was protracted by its scope, which was realistically large enough to require three developers. He estimated that the game would have to sell at least 40,000 units to be successful and not a "total disaster" financially. Chyr stated then that he may leave game development after it is released, due to art games not being financially sustainable. By April 2018, the development of the game had been ongoing for five years. He had become concerned at this time by industry fears of a possible "indiepocalpse" due to possible oversaturation of indie games and was not sure if Manifold Garden would reach completion. Ĭhyr worked on the game on his own for the first three years, circa 2015, at which point he brought on additional staff to help build out the game with a stronger focus on finishing the game. Chyr had used about 2000 hours of professional playtesting through the game's development to make sure players could navigate the game world and solve the puzzles. To help, they designed each outdoor level to appear unique so that players could immediately recognize the setting, and strategic use of windows and other visibility features so that players could have a sense of a reference point with respect to gravity. His team early on had discovered that playtesters would often become confused in walking around the various levels, combined with the shifting changes in gravity. Ī core part of Chyr's design for the game was to leave it absent of any explicit instructions, using an initial puzzle that required the player, in order to activate a button across a chasm, to jump into the chasm and land on the other side as a result of falling through the game's repeating geometries. Chyr attributes the capabilities of the engine to their graphics programmer Arthur Brussee. The game engine still supports the use and rendering of non-Euclidean portals, with the player able to see through a portal into a different level, and with possible recursion if other portals are in view. This often required rendering more than 500 times the typical geometries that a 3D game engine would provide. Chyr observed that some have called the game taking place in non-Euclidean geometry, but he asserts Manifold Garden uses " impossible geometry" in Euclidean space, employing a method of world wrapping in three-dimensional space to make the world appear infinite. Escher print Relativity upon which it was based, before it was re-revealed as Manifold Garden. The game was originally known as Relativity, after the M.C. Further he wanted to make a puzzle game that he felt he could finish as a player, having learned that after playing through The Witness that there had been an entire section of puzzles he had missed there. Work on the game started in November 2012. Seeking to change his work with sculptures, and finding other mediums cost-prohibitive, he decided to move to a video game with no space limitations. Development Ĭreator William Chyr had a passion for large-scale artwork and was previously known for massive balloon sculptures. Later puzzles will involve growing trees and natural elements to bring life back to the "sterile" world. Because of this, many puzzles revolve around falling off a ledge from a lower part of a structure to land back on the top of the next version of that structure below. The game's worlds frequently appear to repeat into infinity into all directions. Several facets of the game's world may only be interacted with when the gravity is oriented directly, with these objects sharing one of the six colors. To aid the player, the world's tone takes on one of six colors depending on which direction they have manipulated gravity. The player must solve puzzles using the world's geometry in addition to devices within the architecture of the world. The game takes place in a "universe with a different set of physical laws" where the player can manipulate gravity, being able to "turn walls into floors". Video of gameplay Gameplay In Manifold Garden, the game environment repeats itself such that players who fall from a platform fall into another instance of the same structure An upgraded version of the game was released for Xbox Series X and Series S as a launch title on November 10, 2020, and an upgraded PlayStation 5 version released on May 20, 2021. Ports for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One were released on August 18, 2020. The player must navigate an abstract series of structures that appear to repeat into infinity, while solving a progression of puzzles. It was released on Windows, macOS, and iOS on October 18, 2019. Manifold Garden is an indie first-person puzzle video game developed by American artist William Chyr.
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