Aleph Qoph / Duat by ancient-pixel
Wander deeper and deeper into the desert.
See and bond with other wanderers. Bring lost words you have found to the oasis, to get seeds, with these you can plant trees and let the oasis grow deeper into the desert. Place the words into the sand, to help you orientate and find back home.
Oopsie!
I havent tutorialilzed how you plant trees, thats a big error on my side. You need to activate the word you are holding when you are in the water to get a seed, only then with now the seed in your hand, you can plant a tree, instead of a navigation stone.
The good:
The core and minimal product was possible to finish in time and I learned a whole bunch for my main project. Like how to gain performance even in such vast and open spaces like this desert. My pseudo 3d implementation already culls the quads to render quite good. But its still a problem to go through very large arrays of objects and check stuff (eg which to draw) I finally got to draw a font again! (albeit a last minute thing, bc nothing fit)
The bad:
Many things had to be cut. I wanted more player interactions, more gamejuice and different ways of exploration, like a hawk for scouting, dropping items, interact with the trees for small puzzles etc - feature creep was big - at least in my head^^ Also I had to drop the mobile support, bc it was just too much. The power of HTML5 didnt suffice XD
The ugly:
I aimed for the compo, but a very weird and slow day 2 left me with almost no appreciable progress. Day 3 was good though and so I am finished. Maybe I´ll revisit the idea or this particular game another time and add to it, but ofc I dont need another main project :wink:
Controls:
you can play with keyboard and mouse or with a gamepad
to see the controls press ESC ingame and click on the little ? in the lower right corner
WASD/left stick - move
LSHIFT/left trigger - run
SPACEBAR/right bumper - jump
ARROWS/MOUSE/right stick - look
LMB/gamepad A - use
thank you, have fun playing and please give me your feedback, thoughts and ideas :blush:
| Link | https://github.com/AncientPixelAP/deeper-oasis |
| Link | https://deeper-oasis.herokuapp.com/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/aleph-qoph-duat |
Ratings
| Given | 30🗳️ | 53🗨️ |
Walking in the desert is the good idea for the game.
There were something strange with ground surface under character. This is look like the deformation. Was it by design?
Also it ran really smooth on my potato computer. The 'mutliplayer' gave me some Journey vibes, could imagine the tech in combination with some proximity-based conference tech (like Workadventure) to work for virtual meetups even.
None of my seeds sprouted, I guess I should have persevered and continued further. As much as I like the meditative aspect of that, I think for a jam game you should take into account the mind-space of the players which is 'I want to play and rate many games' and reduce the experience to be digestible in 10-15 minutes. You might be underestimating the (sadly short) attention span of the average player.
Anyway it's beautiful, even if I didn't get to see the flowers!
@viktor-dedek Thanks for helping the oasis to grow :)
@yuri-yakovlev Thank you for playing! You can only find back to the oasis, if you mark the way with "putting words" into the sand. If you pick up a symbol, you can use it anywhere to leave a marking stone. The stange warping is from the skewed sprites as this is not a true 3d game and engine :)
@tudypie Yeah, thank you! This game is multiplayer and the other shadows are other players. Unfortunately i didnt have enough time to implement a true ending or purpose^^
@drskort Thank you very much!
@minotalen Thank youo for the kind words! I would have like a proximity based system to hug and exchange words - maybe sometimes Ill work on it some more :)
Sadly, on my first run, where I spent most of the time (until end of story), I did not had any player encounter, nor did I ran into water surface again to try planting seeds there. Might be just due to me moving mostly in one direction. Impressive work either way.
Using stones as marker is actually clever, I didn’t thought of that :open_mouth:
Also I thought you have implemented affine transformations for the textures, but you made that engine/3D all by yourself? Impressive…
Mouse look was moving waay too fast, even when I turned down my mouse dpi so it moves stupidly slowly, didn't seem to effect the game. Also, when I had the game in not-fullscreen, it keeps pulling the view down. The super fast movement in fullscreen kinda gave me motion sickness so I couldn't really continue.
It looks really cool though. The PS1 style warpy textures are very nice :D
EDIT: also, on firefox on windows 10
@humphreysmedia Thank you, yes, I got used to it too and had "developer blindness" - now I am working on a quick fix (especially bc its worse on 4k displays :grimacing: )
I dont have other monitors to test with, but I believe I found a solution for the mouse sensitivity in 4k or different monitor setups @wheybags if you are able too test it, I would be very grateful :)
Also I labeled the menu buttons to be less confusing and am monitoring a problem, where a tree seed planted in the grass wouldnt spawn a tree sometimes. Which must be related to synching issues between players... i dont fully know yet
Thanks for being part of the stream, yesterday was amazing! :smile:
It's a gamble to use a radically different graphical style and I applaud you for it. Unfortunately, it really hurt my eyes and I couldn't play super long. I tried on a smaller screen too and the issue was the same.
Too bad because I found the premise interesting and would have love to start planting breadcrumbs-tree around to go deeper and deeper until I find the perfect seed. (at least that's what I understood from the game)
I feel like your name @ancient-pixel is on point for this game!
btw the text in the tree was some usual javascript shenanigans bc alpha = 0 apparently isnt always 0^^
@threeli Thank you very much :)
yep, getting lost is what you can do but actually I should have done more, than just give the players waystones to place - like autoorientating them to face to the oasis, or let the sand show the direction with its lines - smth like that :smiley:
Has a very esoteric feel. It's fun, but more than being fun it's...cathartic, maybe? I dunno, there's something meditative in just wandering the desert looking for words with the music on low.
now, since I can really play the game, I'm not gonna rate it (good or bad) since that feels unfair to me. just thought I'd let you know that this might be an issue for some people.
@otresnjak thx :) I am working on the mouse issue, could you please tell me what your desplay setup and resolution is?
If all breaks you can look around with the arrow keys :grimacing:
@wintergatn :sweat_smile: the footsteps are an instrument. You are right and I am thinking about updating the game with some more items to find and varied terrain generations the further out you go. Thanks for playing and your feedback :)
First attempt I just wandered into the desert and got lost, and the second attempt I started to plant trees but nothing seemed to happen. I think a bit more signposting / forcing the player to learn the rules would certainly help at the start, as figuring them out is quite hard!
But I really like the style, and would love to play more like it :)