- Release Notes: July 2, 2025 - 2 July 2025
GraphicsFixed a critical issue that prevented all Windows 11 users from playing the game due to videos not working at all.Details:A recent Microsoft update to all Windows 11 systems seems to have rendered the AV1 Video Extension component useless. The legacy Windows Media Player is no longer able to play AV1-encoded videos with that package installed. My game is built on WPF and was using MediaElement to render AV1 videos through the WMP, which required the AV1 Video Extension to be installed. After the Microsoft update, videos were no longer working at all in the game on Windows 11 systems.To resolve the issue, I've rewritten the entire video component in the game from scratch to no longer depend on MediaElement. Instead, it now relies on the Edge WebView2 runtime's WPF component and a new control that I made to render and manage the state for an HTML5 video element. My testing shows t…
- Game Development: Lambda Enigma - 18 May 2025
Join me while I work on various game development tasks for Lambda Enigma, such as coding in C#, creating 3D artwork and animations, sound design and much more. Anyone interested in Lambda Enigma, or simply game development in general, is welcome! I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts about my game if you've played it already. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Did you run into any major or minor issues while installing or playing? Need any help with that? Did the game meet your expectations based on its Steam Store page? See you there! - Dave
- Patch Notes: May 13, 2025 - 14 May 2025
General Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when accessing the Controls tab in the Settings menu (Esc). Suppressed the Windows Alt+Space system menu key combo so that the Alt key for axis restriction (default) and the space key for flipping an object (default) can be pressed simultaneously in game without accidentally and frustratingly opening the system menu. After starting a New Game while on the first gear or laser tablet puzzle, the player's last code solution is also cleared now, so that it's no longer filled in automatically when they progress to that point again upon replaying the game. Workbench Disabled the tablet navigation button while the laser is active in laser puzzles. Computer Improved one of the computer puzzle story screens to be more consistent with a prior screen. (Leaving out the details here to avoid any spoilers.) Changed one of the final puzzle's success me…
- Release Notes: May 9, 2025 - 9 May 2025
General When starting the game a new HUD animation with devices and measurements is displayed, and it searches for a signal until the animation sync frame is reached before transitioning to flying into the workshop. Added an indicator at the top right corner of the screen to indicate when the intro video is skippable by left mouse clicking. Fixed clicking to skip on the intro so that the player doesn't have to click again after the intro animation begins when they click while it's "loading" to wait for the sync frame. Now it just skips directly to the workbench when they click. Several general bug fixes and optimizations. Controls Added a new navigation button to access the toolbox under the workbench, displayed in various scenarios, and remaining until the player progresses past the point when it's no longer needed. Updated trackpad camera orbit so that the right mouse button isn't req…
- Game Development: Lambda Enigma - 7 May 2025
Join me while I work on various game development tasks for Lambda Enigma, such as coding in C#, creating 3D artwork and animations, sound design and much more. Anyone interested in Lambda Enigma, or simply game development in general, is welcome! I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts about my game if you've played it already. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Did you run into any major or minor issues while installing or playing? Need any help with that? Did the game meet your expectations based on its Steam Store page? See you there! - Dave
- Game Development: Lambda Enigma - 15 March 2025
Come and join me while I work on various tasks related to my next planned update of Lambda Enigma. WARNING: There will be some spoilers. Anyone interested in Lambda Enigma, or just game development in general, is welcome! I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts about Lambda Enigma if you've played it already. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Did you run into any major or minor issues while installing or playing? Did the game meet your expectations based on its Steam Store page? See you there! - Dave
- 1 Week Later... - 10 March 2025
Hey everyone, It's been 1 week since Lambda Enigma was released in Early Access. And I hope you've all had a great week! I've been hard at work on the next release. In this short announcement, I'd like to briefly share some info and images with you regarding what I've been working on. WARNING: This post may contain spoilers. I'll also mention that I haven't received much feedback yet, so if you've already played the game then please let me know what you liked, or what you didn't like, about it. Your feedback is valuable to me! In the meantime, I'm simply prioritizing what I had already planned to work on from the beginning. I have a ton of ideas, so I'll just continue working through my list. Start Menu & Loading On the initial start menu, when you press the button to start (or continue) your game, you may have noticed that sometimes the loading indicator is shown for several seconds. A…
- Patch Notes: Mar 06, 2025 - 6 March 2025
Graphics Fixed a major performance issue that was caused by having realistic lighting enabled while in full screen mode if the player had multiple monitors. General The name of the current beta branch, if the player is able to opt-in to one, is now displayed on the bottom-right corner of the pause menu instead of the "Early Access" label. At the time of writing there aren't any public beta branches yet, but I do plan on opening one in the future.
- Early Access Release - 3 March 2025
Whew, that took a minute. 2+ years worth of minutes, to be more precise. It's been a crazy journey to get here. My first game, finally released for sale on Steam! I had to apply just about everything I know regarding application development as a professional software engineer for over 20 years to build what is practically speaking my own personal game engine for Lambda Enigma. And I had to learn a bunch of new things, ranging from how to use Blender to how to do Foley art, from how to write a Blender addon to how to write a real-time sound mixer. Making a new puzzle game is a puzzle in itself. Anyway, I just clicked the release button for the first time so I'm super excited and I wanted to write this little post. I hope you enjoy the game! Please let me know what you think and also let me know if you'd be interested in joining live coding streams in which I add features and fix bugs in…
- Patch Notes: Mar 02, 2025 - 3 March 2025
Workbench Fixed a small visual glitch in which an externally attached gear was slightly clipping through the inside of a puzzle. Improved the "Misoriented Gear" tablet puzzle so that calling `rotate` multiple times actually does cause multiple side effects, as the player might expect when experimenting to see how side effects work, despite the fact that their solution is incorrect. Improved the "Jumbled Gears" tablet puzzle so that its side effects follow the new standard behavior as well. Improved the "Red Light, Green Light" laser tablet puzzle. Renamed it to "Hyper Activity" and changed it from tuples, which are the gear-focused theme, to lambdas, which are the laser-focused theme. Patched an unintended solution in the "Splitting Gears" tablet puzzle. Patched an unintended solution in the "Sliding Gears" tablet puzzle. Fixed a very rare bug in the tablet puzzle infrastructure that co…
- Patch Notes: Mar 01, 2025 - 2 March 2025
General Cleaned up some old, unnused assets. Stubbed out the maze puzzle box's infrastructure since it's not ready yet. At the moment, when the maze puzzle box is unlocked by solving its related tutorial computer puzzles, the player may click the lock to open it, but it simply remains empty. Workbench Added a new "Sliding Gears" tablet puzzle. Several improvements and some bug fixes regarding tablet puzzle side effects' behavior and handling. Fixed a bug when the player tries to change puzzles or leave the workbench if the current puzzle has just loaded and its tablet's screen is not fully on yet.
- Patch Notes: Feb 28, 2025 - 1 March 2025
Workbench Added 3 new gear tablet puzzles. Some small text updates to existing gear tablet puzzles. Improved the final gear tablet puzzle so that the coding part is a bit easier. Fixed a visual bug in gear machines whereby some external rods did not have the cloud effect, if an adjacent cell also contained an external rod. Changed the side effect delineator character that is displayed in tablet puzzles from '#' to '@' to avoid ambiguity with the comment character in languages like Python. Computer Added a new computer tutorial gear puzzle named "Actuator Attachment Module".
- Release Notes: Feb 27, 2025 - 27 February 2025
Graphics Major performance improvement for Realistic Lighting when the desk lamp's spotlight moves to follow the mouse cursor. Major improvement to the reflection on the inside of workbench puzzles. Workbench Added a new workbench tutorial gear puzzle to teach the player that 2 flat gears can share the same rod. Improved one of the workbench tutorial gear puzzles by removing an unintended solution and also making it much less congested. Improved two of the tutorial gear puzzles to avoid unintended solutions. Rearranged some of the workbench tutorial gear puzzles for better progression of difficulty and sequential correlation. Improved the HUD so that it no longer interacts with the mouse at all, allowing objects to be grabbed directly through it. Fixed a bug that permitted (although not functionally) flat gears to be facing across a cell in which another flat gear was facing in an ortho…
- Release Notes: Feb 17, 2025 - 17 February 2025
Video Additional stability for video playback to ensure that videos always play for their full duration. Computer Fixed the texture of the bottom dial so that it no longer looks smudged or cut off on some monitors. Improved the style of both dials' labels so that they look more natural. Now they are part of the old, worn out dials, rather than simply looking like bright white decals. Workbench Improved the active cell (greenish box) behavior so that its movement is now always restricted to the current drag restriction region (blueish box), better indicating to the player how drag restriction regions work. Players can now drag objects out of the drag restricted region (blueish box) onto the workbench, even while a drag restriction hot key is down, but only if they move the cursor entirely outside of the puzzle grid; otherwise, drag movement remains restricted to the blueish box. Players…
- Release Notes: Feb 8, 2025 - 9 February 2025
Graphics Major performance optimization for when realisitic lighting is enabled and the player is using the mouse to orbit or zoom the camera. Improved the computer's progress panel pixel shader to hopefully make it readable on ultra high definition monitors, based on beta tester feedback. Improved the "Dave Sexton Presents" logo screen by replacing the hyper gear 3D object with a much nicer looking 3D puzzle piece. Sound Fixed a bug that caused the music volume to jump to the maximum when the game is started, if the volume in the sound settings file is currently "0" and yet the "IsMuted" setting is false somehow. Fixed the volume settings sliders so that they can be dragged to unmute, rather than the player having to click the unmute button themselves before being able to drag the slider. Fixed other volume settings-related inconsistencies. Computer Added more computer screens to advan…
- Release Notes: Feb 1, 2025 - 2 February 2025
Graphics Huge performance improvement for the "Realistic Lighting" setting. Sound Lowered the default music volume and raised the default ambient sounds volume. Added the sound of the desk lamp switching on in the start menu scene when the player is entering the workshop, just before the camera pans down to view the workbench from the top. General When entering the workshop from the start menu, the puzzle boxes are now visible on the workbench as it comes into view, all closed and locked. Changed the text on the "Reset" settings button to "Reset All". The "Reset All" settings button no longer resets the computer dials. Improved how the progress and settings files are managed: Updated the file naming conventions for progress and settings files so that multiple users on the same computer, or the same user across multiple cloud-backed computers, can play the game and have their progress an…
- Credits Screen Update - 30 January 2025
Added a missing license hyperlink and copyright line that I had forgotten to add previously to the Credits screen.
- Release Notes: Jan 24, 2025 - 24 January 2025
Improved the axis restriction keys HUD so that it's a bit clearer what they do and when they're needed. The computer is now a real-time 3D model, with interactable dials and improved lighting. Added a couple of features to help make some of the tutorial computer puzzles easier to learn: The computer now has a "Types" dial, with On/Auto/Off settings. (I'll let you figure out what each setting does.) The computer now has an "Evaluate" dial, with On/Auto/Off settings. (I'll let you figure out what each setting does.) Added a progress meter panel to the computer terminal. Fully implemented the progress meters on the puzzle boxes so they accurately represent how many puzzles are currently available to the player. Added colored pieces of tape to laser deflectors that indicate their rotation restrictions. Added a "New Game" button to the pause menu. Changed the "Exit" menu button to "Quit" so…
