can i play this without a control pad?

Yes it works fine with a keyboard and mouse. If you plug in a controller it assumes you'll use it though.

Nice! Very dark and moody. Kind of expected a light behind a fan somewhere... Also, I used up all of my spells before seeing any enemies, not knowing I had limited ammo. I just ran away from em though.

Haha seems like everyone does that :) I wish I had more time. I had 6 levels planned, but had to chop and rewrite the story (or lack thereof)

Super cool aesthetic! I love the creepy dark look and sounds :) I too ran out of ammo before encountering enemies.

I had some nive time trying this game, nice it is in 3D and ambince was great at start. Had graphic bug during next levels(several walls that did not appeared, XNA blue instead, but collisions worked). Could go throudh the whole game, not very original but nice effort for the overall rendering (sounds + ambiance + gameplay).
Congrats for your game =)

I'll not install anything to play a game...

I liked the visual style and the general atmosphere. It fits the theme very well. But the controls without a gamepad were quite unusual. I had to hold down the right mouse button to look around (?) Also, I had some bugs with collision that did not let me walk across some edges, but I could get across by jumping. Overall, nicely done!

rawbits: Understandable! I did an xna game last ludum dare as well, and it seemed so many more people were willing to play web games. So much easier to just hit a link and play.

Lythom your bug sounds very scary haha. My poor codebase is already so buggy but haven't seen that one.

Elusive, I had a small mouse I drew for the control screen but I'm not sure my little round circle over the button came across. The button is "mmo style", and helps make windowed mode work a bit more smoothly. I'll bet that caught out a lot of people, should have mentioned it in the post.

Hopefully for next time I'll have a better control library that will let people customize things.

I noticed that collision bug with the small ramp. I'm going to be digging into that when I get vis working again. It looks like it's hitting the extra axial leaf side.

The game was quite ambitious. Unfortunately, a bunch of bugs made it a bit difficult to enjoy it:

- There was some collision bug on the bridge in the first level: I would walk really slowly on it without jumping
- On the second level, there were some one-way walls, and many missed shapes. I could walk on air in some parts, and the spell room was all open.
- The Controls screen was a bit too fast. I had to start the game three times to get all the controls.

Also, I would suggest you drop the "press left mouse button to look around", I don't quite see the reason to leave that locked, since on FP games we usually move the camera around all the time. Also, if you DID move the mouse without pressing LMB, the camera would "jump" to the real mouse position when you pressed it.

Hope you fix these bugs, I liked your level design!

I am not sure what is causing the graphical errors for some folk. I've got two machines that will run it and both are ok.

The collision bug I just fixed and it was a nasty one. The outer face elimination stage eventually links solid to empty portals back to the original brush faces from the editor. When it does so usually the plane numbers match up and all is well (I use quake style shared planes). However I noticed that the sloped non axial planes could in rare cases match up to flat wall planes due to portals being on either side of the plane.

With axial planes you never get that, as the plane sharing code always matches up opposites and marks them as shared. This caused not only the collision bug, but lighting errors as well as the face normal was used.

I'll get rid of the hold mouse thing next time. I am used to it being that way from playing mmos, and it makes it nicer to switch out of a windowed app.

I wonder if the one way walls on level 2 are where the animated lights are normally? If so that must have been difficult to navigate! That area is dark without them.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Oh also, fixing that collision plane problem made the stairs work properly. When I saw that the player didn't smoothly pop up the stairs I just figured I built them too big and didn't have time to fix them, but it was actually messing up due to the aforementioned bugs.

I think the missing walls might be cards that have limited interpolators for texcoords. I was lazily lerping a bunch of vector2's for the light map coordinates, as well as a few things for the phong for dynamic lighting.

I've since packed everything into Vector4's and only using 5 of those registers (0, 1, 2 are actual texcoords, 3 is normal, 4 is worldPos, 5 is a set of 4 lightmap intensity factors)

Overall, great job. Good mood and liked the black and white and the sound fit in nicely.
The controls, as mentioned above were a little wanky, ran into some collision detection issues and the press escape to exit the game text wouldn't go away until I finished the first level. But all of those are very minor.

And let me fix rawbits comment for him...

I'll not install anything to play a game, except for DirectX, Flash, A couple versions of Java, and the unity web player.