Whenever you reach, gather and gain things in Silent Totems, you will be able to walk towards the Photographer guy on the first layer and ask him to take a picture of your rewards which will then be uploaded to the Ludocrazy.com website. There you can associate a display-name for yourself with the picture.

Of course this achievement screenshot allows you to compare yourself with your previous states to see your progress of our sandbox’ed and probably chaotic game world, in a quite ordered way. But it also allows you to compare yourself to others and especially take a look what they reached and what you are still missing.

I’m also hoping people who like the game as much as we do, will use it to show it to others. Giving the players achievement screenshots public URL to friends far away, or show it to people when you are in an environment where you can’t start the game on the phone (often also called “workplace” or office ;)

You can right now take a look at other peoples Visual Achievments they have gained so far.

The game centers on puzzles and player interactions with the strange gameworld, but we think that storyline driven gameplay makes not as much sense on smartphones as does short play sessions with smaller tasks. So most of our puzzles are independant, available in parallel and can be played in any order. Its up to the player to experiment with puzzle elements available everywhere and find out how things work together.

We have more or less 3 levels of difficulty: more trivial tasks given by characters, some harder puzzles that help / extend the results while fulfilling the tasks and very hard puzzles that depend solely on the players puzzle solving intuition and/or sheer cleverness :-)

All puzzles result in immediate feedback, either through a bit of story dialogues, visible effects and last but not least in fulfilling one of our Task Cards.

Task Cards are what you can see on the screenshot above, simple "collectible" cards, which feature all possible puzzle situations of our game. So if you solve a puzzle you will fulfill its Task Card. This will allow you to keep track of your progress regarding all puzzles possible in the game (its definitely more than the number 3 on this screenshot indicates ;)

But additionally unfulfilled Task Cards will give you vague hints on what could be possible and present you some sort of carrot-on-a-stick, teasing you to experiment more with the games elements.

Have you ever considered a life on a totem-pole? Imagine a whole day, sitting ontop of someones head, while at the same time have someone else sit on your head. But its not about less space and much pressure, its also about the fact not being able to move at all. And now imagine this every day of a year, many years.

Dislike that? Well, i guess you can understand now how the fleeing parts in Silent Totems feel. In order to catch them you will have to come up with some really good ideas, or else you will never get recognised as a true talented totem catcher. You know: Gotta catch'em all! ;)

Probably what one should call the main gameplay of Silent Totems will be the gathering of totem parts. The game design intention is to have a clear goal driven gameplay available. With the game having many sidetracked puzzle ideas, which sometimes are selvserving or fulfill extra tasks, there is also the need for a central task where the puzzles will help to fulfill it extra well.

Totem parts will be scattered all over the game, some only playingly requiring you to stumble upon - and collect them. While others will be hidden and require you to discover them. Some will be easy to pick up, others will struggle and make it hard for you to get them.

In february i talked about the relatives you can help throughout the world, you will want to do this - besides helping them rejoin with their families - in the hope to get further totem parts from them as a reward. To motivate players more, we even have a storyline where a desaster is about to happen, initially told to the player by our totem maker - the "guy" you can see on the pictures.

Bring enough totem parts to him and he will errect a totem pole from the parts, hopefully preventing the desaster to happen. And while you're at it - there is even a game achievment you can earn from fulfilling his wish of a extra high totem pole ;)

So the game tries to be two things at once: a strange gameworld, that has its own distinctive feel to it; but instead of a whole storydriven adventure the second "anchor" of the game will be the many rather small things the player can do. While some tasks being simpler, most will require the player to look carefully at clues and experiment with the possibilities.

WARNING: Spoiler(s) ahead. Basically all this texts here contain some spoilers (and will in the future). So if you want to get the full "i don't even know one bit of the game" puzzling experience, don't read this developer diary :) Or forget about it ASAP.

I want to introduce another gameplay mechanic: Water. Which can be somewhere as a lake, flow somewhere down the hill, be split into multiple puddles and remerge into a sea. Basically it will help you solve some puzzles you can't otherwise solve (i don't want to spoilt this here), but it will also deny you some pickups. Because you float on water, but some heavy pickups won't; which makes them un-pickup-able for you.

Enter: the Drinker. A quite large and quite thirsty fish. Of course you get thirsty, jumping on your nose through a land without enough water for you to swim. Nevertheless the Drinker is a helpfull animal. Just ask for its help and it will not only suck in water puddles and lakes until its tummy gets full, but also spit the water out whereever you want it to be.

Mainly this helps picking up things from the bottom of lakes, because no lake left means you can easily walk there in order to pick them up. But beware: The game will also feature lava puddles. And of course Drinkers can't drink anything, or can they?

So the game is about puzzles. But its intentionally not about grid based board-game like maze solving (this time not, next game will be again, i promise). It's also not about classical adventure-style combine inventory items.
Instead its about easy things that are as strange as possible without loosing "normal" players with "normal" brains. So one of the mechanics is about remembering and visually recognising shapes.

Silent Totems world was once inhabited by nice "people", doing their daily business. Until evil came by and they had to fight it. Ofcourse the good people won and evil was banished, but as usually there was a price to pay: Many of the peoples family members got turned into stone and as if that wouldn't be bad enough where shattered in the world. So even with the right magic to bring back the missing relatives to life, still they need to be found.

Thus you will meet the folks of Silent Totems who will ask you to find their relatives (A), and when you bring the pieces to them (B), they will be able to bring their loved ones to life and give you pieces theyself found of others (C). Which you then can once again pick up (D) and combine with further shapes (E).

And to make the game interesting, it does not have only a handfull of predesigned levels with few characters, but instead there is a huge amount of interestingly shaped creature characters that will sometimes make you smile and sometimes cringe. (Well, their names should make you giggle, atleast it lets us smirk all the time).

added multithreading to enable ont he fly creation of zones, improved shading visual results and vastly improved raycaster performance, with memory layout cleanup improved possible viewing distance.