Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Fun for the long Labor Day weekend — Viewfinder is 20% off on Steam until September 8:

Challenge perception, redefine reality, and reshape the world around you with an instant camera. Viewfinder is a new single player game offering gamers hours of interesting and fun experiences while uncovering the mysteries left behind. Viewfinder is a mind-bending first person adventure game in which you can bring pictures to life by placing them into the world.

As longtime readers may remember, I started cheerleading for and chatting with Viewfinder indie's developer, Matt Stark, back when it was just a viral demo released during the peak of COVID in 2020:

Above: Original Viewfinder demo

As you might expect, Mark tells me he created this effect for a puzzle game he's working on. "I think the puzzles could be open-ended, allowing the player to approach them creatively," he tells me. "I'm at the stage of brainstorming level mechanics and trying to decide what the anatomy of a puzzle in the game should be.

As for achieving this effect, here's how he does it:

"When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment's meshes to make a hole for the photo." 

Or to put it another way, he puts a copy of the world on top of the world, and erases anything that would cause those worlds to overlap, until they're ready to do so. (If you know what I mean, and I'm not even sure I do.)

Here's the Steam page.