Picross VR Devlog: Intro

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

For the last few months I've been getting back into a game project I initially started some two years(!) or so ago. It's a puzzle game in which you solve picross-like puzzles in 3D space. If you're unfamiliar, a nonogram is traditionally a 2D puzzle in which you create an image from clues on the edges of a grid. These historically have been in both print and video games (Nintendo has a number of Picross titles beginning on the Game Boy), but (almost) always presented in a 2D manner.

I can't pinpoint when I got the idea, but I'm sure it was inspired in part by the puzzle elements in Half-Life Alyx. I really enjoyed the minigames in which you're using the multitool to solve some sort of spatial puzzle to open a locker or upgrade station. It's the sort of gameplay that I feel only works in VR. I wanted to pursue that and see what I could come up with. One idea was this puzzle game, which I've decided to run with for the time being.

As I write this, I'm also getting ready for Buffalo Game Space's first "Maker's March", a month-long event encouraging community members to complete a milestone defined at the start of the event. It's a level of accountability that I find exciting as I am notoriously bad at meeting my own deadlines, so I will be participating for sure. So rather than blindly just post about it out of context I wanted to get a blurb up first to set the stage (and also kick off devlogs on here in general).

And for a quick visual, the video below shows the state the project is (mostly) in. This shows the puzzle editor, where I show off saving, loading, and editing of puzzle data. Given the focus on puzzles, I'm going to need to make a lot of them. Building in-game is much easier than manually entering voxel data.

Excited to share more with folks. I plan on posting the actual milestone here once I actually have something semi-solid in place, so expect that probably tomorrow or Friday.