The Cave by incobalt
You find yourself deep within a dark cave, lit only by your light, a torch that barely pierces the darkness. It is up to you to find your way through the twisting passages and out into the open world. You cannot do this alone. Along the way you will find torches that will provide light when placed upon the sconces that dot your path. The further you go, the harder it will be to find the torches and make it through. Yet, you must carry on.
And, one last thing before you go. This isn't a game about a cave.
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You will interact and look around with the mouse, and you can move using the arrow keys or WASD. Pressing Escape (or the ` key) will bring up a menu where you can adjust the volume, how long messages remain on screen, and dark area brightness (provided in case your screen has issues with the dark areas in the game). By default, the starts in fullscreen mode, but you can use alt+enter to escape that and resize the window. Unfortunately, Unity discontinued the startup launcher in 2019 (unbeknownst to me) so there are no resolution or keymapping settings (sorry!).
This game was made in 48 hours, using Unity 2019.4.11f, The music was made using LMMS and additional instrument samples were provided by DSK Music with the Overture VST. All graphics were made in Blender and Paint .NET. Special thanks to IMG Online's seamless texture generator for texture stitching, and NormalMap-Online by Christian Petry for normal map generation. The font used in The Cave is called Philosopher and is an OFL font by Jovanny Lemonad.
UNFORTUNATELY, Unity's WebGL doesn't support realtime global illumination and this game is almost entirely that, so no Web version this time.
| Windows x64 | https://incobalt.itch.io/the-cave |
| Link | http://incobalt.me/Games/TheCave/The_Cave_Source.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-cave |
Ratings
| Given | 22🗳️ | 27🗨️ |
@wolderado Oh! Gosh I'm embarrassed. My main camera does have a light blue background on it from when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to do the cave mouth effect. When you mentioned a directional light I was like I *thought* I removed that (was trying it as a darkness correction for a bit), and I thought to double check my camera and there it was. It was fully transparent, so I think I just grabbed the wrong slider when I thought I was changing it back to black. Oops! Oh well :P
@bodaciouslycrazy Yeah, there's more I could do with this, but I couldn't get it all together with the time I had. And I'd want a better system for lighting than I have at the moment. It's a bit of a hack, relying on the GI system here. Naming the torches has a symbolic meaning in this game, and I don't expect everyone to get symbolism. Remember, though, that the game is very explicit about not being about a cave. It's not really about lighting torches, either.
@wiredoverload I hadn't thought of it that way, but I suppose that's true about the theme. Thinking about it, I probably should have had the game in reverse, starting at the mouth of the cave and going until you find "your light". Oh well, there's still a lot of "deep" theming I'm trying out here, though :)
@mighty-mufflon-games Thanks! I'm not sure I quite understand the "twist" unless you've managed to read into it well and are referring to the last line of the credits. Either way, glad you enjoyed it!
@lazzor In a more fleshed out game, you'd probably have very few torches to name over the course of the game and you'd have torches recur that were already named from previous puzzle chambers. Having so many all at once is a bit tedious and it doesn't make sense at the time. Glad you liked it, though :D
also having the character be unable to enter the darkness was a nice touch too. removing the option to wander in darkness is a good way to keep the player focused (because my adhd ass would be going straight in there the moment it took longer than 5 seconds to find a torch :P)