​Fake Illusions project page live! But what's Fake Illusions?

I've been working on this game on and off for about a year now (starting around the time I wrapped up Mobility). I haven't had much time to work on it for the past year, but I'm happy to say that it's almost nearing completion! I'm also gonna try to get it selected for some events, which is why I'm putting the project page up now!

What's Fake Illusions?
I love optical illusions, and I wanted to make a game about them! There have been a bunch of games about optical illusions, most famously Monument Valley, but most of them have focused on impossible geometry. Not that I'm against that (I've just up a poster of Escher's Waterfall in my room), but I really wanted to make a game about how optical illusions deceive your eyes and your brain. Here's what I came up with.

The game presents you with a historical illusion, like the Hermann Grid in this example. Because of the contrast between black and white on an intersection, your eyes perceive this as a darker color than it actually is! Moving your eyes changes these dots, too. Your sight has betrayed you, and if you don't believe me, take a screenshot or print it out—the ghostlike dots will still be there to haunt you.

But that's where the faker comes into play! It's an illusion made real, imposing as an actual eye-deceiver. The faker works differently in each illusion, but here, it will simply place an actual dot on one of the numbered intersections. Here, try this one (click for fullscreen):

Scroll a bit down to see the answer.

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It's 17! Did you spot it? The game can generate little challenges like this on the fly, and it can throw some annoying distractions in the mix too. But let's save that feature for a later post, and jump right to:

Why are you making this?

You might've noticed this game is completely different from my last game Mobility. For that game, I was attempting to make a specific genre of games more accessible. This time around, I just wanted to do the "accessible" part.

You might've noticed the "accessibility info" at the project page, but I'll summarize it here: it's color blind friendly, has almost no text at all, can be played with just the mouse, has a global difficulty slider, and because I labeled all illusions with numbers, you can play the game together by just discussing. I am really proud that I managed to get all of these features in this game, and I hope it adds to the appeal of the game for some. The only downside for accessibility: the game has a lot of potential triggers for people with photosensitive epilepsy, but I hope that's not too much of a dealbreaker for most players, and I've put a warning for it both on the project page and when the game loads.

On the other hand, I hope it helps people realize how much our perception is flawed and biased, and you should be highly suspicious about your senses. I hope some will take it as a metaphor for fake news and the like. There's barely any text in the game at all, so the game invites you to draw your own conclusions.

How far is it along?

I started working on it last year, but since I was also doing a couple of internships at that time, I didn't get much time to invest into it. Now that that's all wrapped up, I can finally put in the time to polish and release the game!

That said, I'm not willing to give a release date yet. I originally said Mobility would release in 2016 on my old website, but that ultimately became 2018. It also depends on how much bigger I want to make the game: currently it has seven different illusions that are all playable in a couple of different modes, which I think is pretty decent already. But I still have a couple of ideas to scale it up.

I'm also not sure if this game will be pay-what-you-want or paid-up-front. I did not earn a lot with pay-what-you-want donations on Mobility, but I really want the game to be as accessible as possible, too. I could also make both a paid and a free version, but then I'm not sure how to decide which content goes into both versions and which features would be exclusive to the paid version. I'm still going to look into mobile, but I don't have the licenses for that yet, so no promises there.

What's next?

I documented Mobility's development from very early on, now I'm starting pretty late. I still have a bunch of game design topics I want to cover—Fake Illusions is not a kind game that has been attempted before, which means that I get a lot of interesting design problems to solve. Expect notes on distractions, illusions, window resolutions, randomness, colors, and info on the host of quality-of-life features the game has.

I already typed too much, but if you want to keep up with this project, add this game to a collection or follow me either on itch or Twitter. You can also join the mailing list if you just want to know when the game is out. Thanks!