The Aftermath

Well, this is it for this semesters project.

It was a fun and interesting experience, a very different game than the ones we did before. And we are really proud of it just the way it is! On Wednesday the 12th of February we received the critique and review on the projects from our professors over at the Hochschule Darmstadt. Especially our project received a lot of praise, because it was so polished and presentable! We couldn´t be luckier, right?

But what now?

For starters, we have signed up our game for the German Computer Game Award (DCP) in the category "Best Concept from School and College", FoldUp is the entry number 601, so hold your thumbs and wish us luck!! (The award comes with a nifty 35.000€ reward that we could put into doing even more awesome games)

And then, sadly, we will have to cease work on FoldUp.
Next semester, we will need to focus on our Bachelor Degree project, which each of the team members will do separately. This will be hard and straining, in fact some even start now to get a little bit more time! But that doesn´t mean we will forget this project. FoldUp is great, and as my last deed as the Social Media Manager, I want to show you how YOUR 2D Kirigami Patterns made with FoldUp can look if you print them out and Fold them, creating your own Kirigami Pop-Up book!

 

You can find the rest of the gallery (all of our levels in real paper) on our Facebook page!

Thanks for the continued support and, FOLD SOME STUFF!

Beta Build for User Testing!

The moment we have been waiting for.

The moment where we present you with our creation. It has arrived.

The FoldUp Game Open Beta v0.9d(Windows Build, ~36MB)

You can find your patterns and levels from the Editor in the "Assets\Levels" folder of this archive, so don´t forget to save and name it properly ;) When you "Load Texture" to give your created patterns some color, choose "Texture" in the popup window.

(try loading "christmastree" and "kugel" in the editor ;D)

Important: Diagonal Lines, Holes and Flaps are not supported. Horizontal and Vertical Lines only.

Currently the buttons for "Help" and "Options" (questionmark and gears respectively) do not have a function yet. Same goes for the "Share" and "Download" buttons after finishing a level, but these will be there in the final version for sure :)

For now, here is the tutorial screen for the Game part, as well as the downloadable and printable patterns for the first level!

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Version 1

Version 2

The whole team of FoldUp would love to hear what you think of this, in regards to graphis, audio, usability, fun. Was it hard to solve the puzzles? Was it too easy? What can we do better? Does the Editor have everything you need for creating your own patterns? Was there something you missed?

Maybe you even took the time to create a pattern yourself – show us, send us an email or post on our Facebook page!

Thanks for your continued support everyone, we hope you like it so far!

Christmas Surprise!

Today I bring to you a small gift from the FoldUp team: this Christmas Tree Kirigami you can use as a special Christmas Card for your loved ones!

This Popup is an excellent example of how our Free Editor will work! 

I used our Prototype to design the pattern and check if it was foldable. Since I´ve never created a Kirigami before, this took me some time, and it would have taken a lot of paper had I tried to design this manually...

But with our Editor, I could save my progress, redo mistakes and look at the finished product, all before even touching paper!

The Christmas Tree in the Editor

Next I recreated the pattern to print it out and folded away.
Here is the result: Our very first own Christmas Card!

The Christmas Tree in paper

So once again, here are the printable patterns for you to use, now go and make your own creative Kirigami Christmas Tree Card!

Colored

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(print it on colored paper or draw it yourself!)

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Ingame Art & Texturing

Look at this! There´s a bunch of new stuff going on! Doesn´t it look great?

We have been working hard, and in this short video I can show you a lot of things we did actually. For one, what you just saw is a core mechanic of the later gameplay: While placing the lines and cuts, you only have a checkered paper so that you can concentrate and calculate better. But thats kind of boring right? So when you finish the puzzle, you are rewarded with a colored texture on the model! You can even download the texture and print it out to create your own real Kirigami. We were all amazed at how fast Sven managed to create this effect of fading the texture onto the model, he is doing a great job!

Texture:

This is the beta texture I, Pia, created for our pyramid. It is not yet final, but shows the style we are going for. To keep the connection to paper and crafting arts, we decided to make the textures look like folded paper or cardboard, the kind you can get from crafts shops. So in essence, we are making a Kiri-Origami game with Kirigami mechanics and Origami visuals! Best of both I´d say :)

Prototype:

There are also a few more additions to the prototype mechanics, you can now move the pattern by an offset or erase lines in the case you have made a mistake, as well as move the camera around for larger patterns. These functions will be expanded to include zoom too at a later point.

Patterns:

Here is just a small preview of one of the levels! Its a small couch and a side table. We want to have 10 levels of increasing difficulty and this would be a rather easy pattern for the game - and I just love the idea. As you can see, we are only utilising straight edges, diagonals and curves are limited due to programming restrictions. But even so, you can still make interesting, pretty concepts!