Game development is never as simple as creating what you need and then moving on (unfortunately). Sometimes you think you need something only to find you actually needed something totally different. Other times you have something perfect in the moment you make it, but as the game evolves, it loses its place and no longer fits. 

Even with a project as early in development as Obscurity, there's plenty of work that has been altered, disabled, or completely removed as the game comes closer and closing to being a complete product, and I'm going to share some of that today.

The first playable demo of obscurity (called enigma at the time) had a lot of today's functionality, but was practicably unrecognizable from the game today. The location was an area that doesn't exist in the game now, being an early prototype of a resort stage like what is in the second area of the game now, although without materials or any real puzzles. Even then though, the game had an eye-catching visual design, despite a lack of polish, and it definitely guided Obscurity to the visual identity it has today. I'd love to share a picture of this prototype area here, but as far as I know it's lost to the annals of time.

 There's also the lost gameplay the game either once had, or had in development before we decided to move the game another way. For example, there was at one point an impulsion cube that sucked in objects rather then pushing them away like the repulsion cube. Unfortunately the bugs it caused outweighed the value it would've added to the game at this point in time so it was temporarily scrapped, with the potential to return to it later down the line when we decide to introduce more gameplay mechanics to the players.

The biggest piece of changed gameplay for Obscurity was at one point the central mechanic of the whole game. Since its inception we knew Obscurity would involve a time element in one way or another - it simply fit too well into the game's narrative for it not to be a gameplay feature. While we settled on time being frozen within the game's plot, as well as cubes disappearing and instantiating themselves cosmically after a time as the way we would weave time manipulation into the game, this was not always the case. In the earliest gameplay stages of the game's development cubes would not disappear after a time, instead the player was able to shoot a stasis orb which stopped time for all objects inside the field that was created until a new field was fired. The mechanic was mostly functional, but we realized on important thing - we had no idea what to do with it. We came up with a handful of puzzles but after that we had no direction for where to take the game further. In the end we had to make the decision to push the game a different way and in turn we've had far more room for puzzles variety, which we hope means more fun for the players down the line.