Thermodynamic Demo

[The Burrito]

A couple days ago I made this rough demo that revolves around heat and state changes (solid,liquid,gas).
I'll probably make a real puzzle game out of it eventually, this was just sortof a proof of concept to make sure it would work and would be fun to play with.
Theres no artwork or anything, just colored blocks.
W,A,D moves the green "player" around which absorbs heat from the surroundings, left mouse heats up tiles draining your heat resource. Numbers 1-6 will turn the block under the mouse into a particular element (air,wood,water,stone,metal,rubber). every other key will toggle between normal and heat map view (white hot).
Elements have different thermal conductivity, melting and boiling points. Wood has an ignition point and will throw off heat as long as it's above that temp.

frying pan.png (7.92 KiB) Viewed 3784 times

frying pan hm.png (8.17 KiB) Viewed 3784 times

The next step will be to make specific heat and more realistic modeling of thermal conductivity. Also some sort of check to make liquids level out and making heat rise in gases. If it does become a real game you can expect puzzles where you have to do things like burn wood to get more heat, boil water to melt ice on the ceiling, and melt / freeze things to form steps and make holes through walls.

[Ellohir]

I liked a lot the concept, it's great the flow of the water and steam. Suggestions: make heat vision a gradient of blue-yellow-red, as many are used to see. And if you make some levels, you could make the player "absorb" or "give" temperature from the block in front of him, and turn him more blue or red. As a mobile heat can (something like go to the fire, get heat, go to water, give heat, repeat 2 times and water boils). Using the mouse looks more like The Incredible Machine (which is also fine, btw).

The idea is great and implementations seems fine too, there are many posibilities for this system.

[The Burrito]

Thanks, I plan on doing away with the mouse and letting the player emit heat in different directions. Probably changing to a black - blue - red - yellow - white heat map like most people are familiar with that will overlay onto grayscaled sprites once I make some artwork.

[Taehl]

This is a cool idea! Have you thought about how the puzzles would work? Will it be a Portal-style "escape the room, escape the next room, ..." kind of thing, or more varied (possibly unique to each level), like "clear the road", "down the Hindenburg", "make breakfast"?

Bugs in this test include: If you hold jump while under a platform, you'll stick to the ceiling for a while; You can walk through water, but upon touching it, it'll freeze and you'll get stuck.

[The Burrito]

I've considered a few things, I'd like it to vary a bit but may still theme some levels around stuff (maybe if I do say 50 levels have groups of 5-10 levels with a little mini story to go along with them). The fact that I've been working on In The Dark for a couple of years now makes me hesitant to make anything story driven.

Bugs in this test include: If you hold jump while under a platform, you'll stick to the ceiling for a while; You can walk through water, but upon touching it, it'll freeze and you'll get stuck.

The first is easily fixable, the second isn't exactly a bug, I was testing the idea of liquids being a hazard in exactly that way, you don't absorb heat while expending it, so it's costly but you can melt your way out. You'll be able to walk through warm water without much issue once I retune the heat absorption.

[Lafolie]

This is cool. I love how you simulated a draft as you move the player. You can see it on the alternate view, it's pretty good.

[hughes]

This shows the foundations of something really amazing. I love figuring out what each material was by seeing how it responded to heat.