The Book Of Dawn by SophistiCat Games
Greetings, traveler. I was expecting you.
I am Aurora, and I was tasked to turn the words engraved in The Book of Dawn into energy, thus turning them into happiness and hope so that the world may retain it's humanity.
Alas, only the words of humans can conform a suitable ingredient of this great power. And the power is escaping by the minute.
Come forth if you wish, for however fleeting your presence is in this room, it can be forever kept within these pages.
Write your own story in the book, or bless the words of others.
Keep the magic alive.
The Book of Dawn
A collaborative experience more than a game, it strives to serve as a pool of positivity and good wishes in this world. The magic of the book is running out, and to replenish it you must estill your blessing on the words of others (by clicking on their messages). You can also leave your mark in the book, so that others can bless your words.
Come fast, before the magic extiguishes forever...
NOTE: Due to the kickass nature of the graphics, we recommend playing the game in full screen.
PLAY ME
Credits
Art by Nayla Novotny (ArtStation)
Programming by Borja Lorente (Personal Page)
Post-jeam changelog
Reading comments and some of the messages, We realized that the message length limit was set to 150 characters. This was not intentional and was a byproduct of early development, and we have fixed it in order to allow for longer messages (220 characters, IIRC).
| HTML5 (web) | https://sophisticat.itch.io/the-book-of-dawn |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/the-book-of-dawn |
Ratings
| Overall | 768th | 2.778⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 854th | 1.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 359th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 825th | 2.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 30th | 4.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 641th | 1.563⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 370th | 3.316⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 4🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
Given the 'what others write show up in the book' make me wonder if anything is being done regarding bad actors writing mean/hateful/bad things in the book.
Also, appears that you are getting '\n' in the text output. probably isn't addressing people pressing return correctly when entering text.
It's not so much of a game, but the visuals are fascinating.
I recognize I'm approaching this from the perspective of wanting something new and exciting, while you've clearly gone for a strict genre alignment, which I should respect. So by all means, though I didn't enjoy the art and music personally my hat goes off to you for it. I don't really see how this ties in to the Running out of Power theme, but nevermind.
A couple bugs in what little exists of the gameplay:
- You seem to render newlines as the literal characters '\' and 'n'. Would be nice to be able to send in multiline messages, but even without that you could at least use a String.Trim() there
- clicking the left arrow takes you to the first page instead of the previous one
- you display empty messages and allow people to vote on them. Just, message = message.Trim(); if (message.Length > 0) SendToDatabase();
Also, would be nice to see exactly what rating each message got and which number page I'm on.
Flipping back always returns you to the first page which is kind of confusing.
Just a couple of things:
- I've fixed some of the issues with the message sending and formatting. It should not allow empty messages or \n ended messages now. I'm really tired and probably have introduced some new bugs, I'll try to fix them tomorrow. Also, the blessing counter has been introduced (thanks @amras0000 for the suggestion).
- Regarding the troll/hateful/nonsensical comments (@jason-kennedy). We are not interested in moderating the book by hand, since this is more of an experiment and experience than it is a joy ride. **HOWEVER!** I'd like to investigate the possibility of sorting the entries by upvotes, something like reddit. Don't know how hard that would be for my poor server-programming skills though.
- About the joy ride, I admit that it is hard to call this a game, but call it as you will we made it because we felt that it could be interesting, and we hope you enjoy it.
- The art style is of course a matter of taste, but I certainly find it awesome and really enjoyable. We are not musicians, so for the audio we had to make do with free assets though :) And my particles are not the best, I apologize for that.
Thank you all for playing and leaving your awesome feedback!
Have a good one!
The entries are now sorted by upvotes, so that the most meaningful and interesting messages rise to the top!
Have fun!