Search and Resque by Hilvon
Welcome to Search and Resque. A game where you have to take up a mantle of a search and resque operative and descend into a mining facility that sustaind some damage from eathquake.
You need to find all the miners who are still stranded down there.
The game contains a tutorial within it, but just in case you are wondering - WASD for movement and mouse for look direction. Left and Right mouse button activate your lock opening and Digging tools respectively.
The game contains no sound - this is quite usual for my games, and this one is not an exception. Still going to leave sound voting on to let you guys gem more karma - feel free to rate it a 1.
The game utilizes a marching cubes algorythm to generate mesh for digable area. It is written in such a way so if you so wish you can find an exit on the lowest level of the facility and keep diffing deeper and deeper and it will not limit you. Unfortunately this came with a hefty performance cost. I pulled every trick to optimize the code (except offloading the computations to GPU which is arguably the only correct fix to this algorytm) but it might still take a toll on your CPU.
Hope you have fun!
~~WARNING! The web version is NOT WORKING AS INTENDED. The map is supposed to have a mass of digable ground that blocks some of the passages. Unfortunatelly WebGL does not handle that. You can still explore the facility and find all the miners, but the key mechanic of the game is missing. If you want to play the game as it was intended to me played - use one of the downloaded versions.~~
Ratings
| Overall | 613th | 3.219⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 630th | 3.031⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 423th | 3.25⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 449th | 3.578⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 505th | 3.359⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 699th | 1.674⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 501th | 2.313⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 596th | 3⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 54🗳️ | 78🗨️ |
I recon you played the WebGL version. :smile:
I mean the marching qubes I implemented also had some mixes up triangles so there were "holes" in the ground mesh but hardly big enough for you to fall through.
Unfortunately WebGL does not generate those ground meshes, so you get opening in the places that were left open by design and should've binn filled with ground for you to dig.
Then in the actual buld version - outside Unity Editor - the performance kind of leveled a bit, but by that time all the settings were already built in, and I didn't feel like adjusting them again.
However in case the game has future development, this is definitely something to look into. :smile:
@rushhourz - I had the feeling that I am biting more that I can chew all the way till about 5 hours before the deadline. Especially since on day one all I had was a messy marching cubes implementation that dropped fps to 5 with character viewrange around 5 units. But I am super stoked to have actually managed to pull it off! :smile:
@h0pe86 - Me too. Me too. I actually wanted to record some sounds for the game using my own voice... and then realised I don't have the software to do it. And with 3 hours to the deadline I decided to focus on making the builds rather than chasing a way to add sounds.
@hungryroy - Hm. That is odd. I had some issues with the camera speed during development. Guess the fixes didn't cover all the situation. :cry: Anyway I hope you liked the rest of the game.
@sharkmax218 Thank you for the feedback. I am aware of the "Turbo mouse" problem and I am going to look into it and maybe add a fixed version.
Yes, the environments are a bit bland. But with excavatable ground mechanic taking the entire first day and a good chunk of day two to implement and optimize for performance, there were only so much time I could spend on making models and textures and the rest of the game. And I prioritised adding UI and tutorial hints over making textures and furniture for the enfironment.
My only real complaint is the lack of sound. The atmosphere could have really kicked of with a bit of echoes, footstep, breathing, etc...
I believe the player can soft lock if he venture to far in the ground with the furthest miner.
Good experience, the way of mining can probably be digged (pun not intended) !
I am aware of the possibility of soft locking if you dig outside the facility and don't leave yourself some ground to climb back. But that was left kind of intentionally, so people can dig to their heart's content after finding all the miners. And when you give a player freedom to do anything they wish, you can't stop them from locking themselves out.
good efforts!
Good luck in compo!
Cool screenshot 8))
Unfortunatelly the comfined timeframe forced me to cut most of those features.
@noobhereo I am glad you liket the art style of the game. My early prototypes of marching cubes resulted in some pretty blocky dirt meshes, so I decided that a low-poly character models for miners would fit well with it.
Also you are right. Those are space suit, or rather "Hazardous Environment" suits (like hev-suit from HalfLife). Specifically fot that reason I left the head as cube - to rienfoce the inpression that this is a helmet.
@neon A Pro tip (I totally forgot to mention in controls tutorial). If you hold Shift you cet the mouse poinetr back and both your weapons will use mouse cursor rather than center of screen for targeting.
@glitchman Based on the absense of residual dirt in the hole, I recon the dirt mesh generation didn't work for you. Was that screensho taken from web build? Or some standalone builds also fail to display ground?
@ruslanch Ага. Понимаю. Рад что игра понравилась. :smile:
Some annoyances, though:
- Digging is verry slow. I see you mentioned mesh rebuild frequency, maybe you could get away with using multiple disconnected volumes, and reducing the resolution a bit? That way frequent rebuilds would hurt less and the digging could be sped up. (also, hey, it's a jam game, don't beat yourself up for performance!)
- Mouse sensitivity was wayyyy too high.
- The door to the room with the broken floor got stuck half-open, leading me to go down first and try to dig verry far trying to find an alternate entrance, but that got me nowhere either. When I returned upstairs, the door was open.
Also, a jump button would be greatly appreciated! It was a bit frustrating to trip and get stuck on the minor clumps of dirt resulting from two full blasts of the digger.
@kroltan, Thank you for your very detailed feedback.
Regarding the suggested optimization - this one is one of the first optimisation I implemented. On top of it, some of the calculations that are not main thread critical are offloaded to a secondary thread (in theory multiple threads, but alas the calculations get bottleneked by the mainthread critical bits), and a queue manager is added to the volume refresh requests prioritising refreshing the volumes based on their relevance by proximity to the player and some more caching magic tricks... I did really spend almost a full day trying to optimize the damned thing.
Mouse sensitivity - yes. It I am aware that it sometimes happens. I am planning to look into fixing it and probably put a fixed version sometime between rating other games and dayjob. But unfortunatelly the problem does not show up on my laptop so it is kind of hard to debug it. :cry:
The door actually is working as intended. It is controlled by 4 buttons and only 2 of those are on the top floor. Basically you need to clear the stair down, put the button there. Backtrack up, go through the door and then go down throught the crack in the floor.
A jump button - honestly I was going to implement it, but somehow got caught up in other fixes and then just got used to clearing the map wihtout is and forgot to actually add this one line of code...
48 hours isn't enough time to make a game but you did well!
Keep up the good work!
I like to imagine that in this hole a giant work mutant hides.
Game is very cool, I adore the digging mechanic!
@ilyas-aqil Thank you for playing. I am really happy with how puzzles turned out. Like the multi-button door. You open one segment right away. then you get the second button in the room across the hallway and as you turn to exit the hallway you can see that there are 2 segments open ow and this should give you the idea that you ned 2 more buttons to open the door. :smile:
Making a "Shoot the button" mechanic was a choice make when I still had plans for enemies you need to kill by zapping them with the same gun you use to power doors. Plus having the ability to zapp buttons from afar opened the opportunity for some tricks like a button on the ceiling, or one away in the yet inaccesible room. And to aleviate the problem with aiming the gun, I added the mechanic of precision tageting (hold shift) but them kind of forgot to mention it in the tutorials... oops...
If the web version doesn't reflect your true vision, it might be prudent to take it down until then. I would count fixing whatever errors as within the LD rules (even though some time has passed).
Overall, well done!
I am in fact working on trying to restore the digable ground mechanic into the web version. I believe the root problem turned out that the Threading is not allowed for WebGL and since the actual mesh generation was offloaded into a thread to save performance, it didn't work.
I have now abstracted out the Asynchronous computations and handlers, so I can provide a class with either threading or Coroutine version of Asynchronous handler. Hopefully this will help. If it does - I will update the web version with this fix.