The Rabbit Hole by Will Chambers

[raw]
made by Will Chambers for Ludum Dare 48 (COMPO)

The rabbit Hole is a dream like interaction sim, where you have a conversation by moving. It's built on Willow, my from-scratch game engine that I've been developing for the past few years.

The game is intentionally vague, so I won't spoil anything here, but know that pressing escape will get you out, even if nothing else will.

Some performance tips:

You'll need a Vulkan capable graphics card, and I recommend 8GB of ram. Thanks for playing!

PS: IF you open the app and a white window shows, that's the loading screen, let that sit until text appears!

Hey All, I've gotten tones of feedback relating to launch issues, sorry about all of that! I just published a fix to Itch.io, Please let me know if it works better now, it's labeled "low-res" because all of the textures are 1/10th the size, bringing the GPU memory footprint from 6GB, to 600MB, should make the game much more playable!

If those of you who have been burned by no-launches have it in your hearts to try again I would love you forever!

thanks,

-Willow Dev

Ratings

Given 2🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

pixlark
26. Apr 2021 · 05:47 UTC
Heads up - you have to set your itch.io page to public for anybody to see it. The link gives a 404 right now, so I imagine it's set to "draft" right now :-)
Rouge_dragon
26. Apr 2021 · 10:35 UTC
The itch.io page is broken!
🎤 Will Chambers
26. Apr 2021 · 14:04 UTC
Update! I fixed the itch.io, thanks for letting me know guys!
mDuo13
26. Apr 2021 · 19:53 UTC
Dang, I tried to run it in Linux in WINE and had no luck. (That's not entirely surprising, but often enough I get lucky and things just work.)
Jeremia
26. Apr 2021 · 20:29 UTC
@willchambers @mduo13 I tried to play it on Windows 10 and it id not work.

Two Windows pop up, one console with "info" logs, and a white window.
🎤 Will Chambers
26. Apr 2021 · 20:59 UTC
@jeremia Did you have Vulkan installed? The console will tell you if something breaks, but if there weren't any errors, then it's probably just the initial load time! If you let it sit for a bit, it should run!
🎤 Will Chambers
26. Apr 2021 · 21:00 UTC
@mduo13 I don't typically make linux builds, but let me see if I can get one running!
phealsout
26. Apr 2021 · 22:14 UTC
For me it doesnt start, it pops up two windows, one console and the application I think but after nothing happens
thebmxeur
26. Apr 2021 · 22:16 UTC
It doesn't work for me either (I'm on Windows 7). I know the itch page says to install the vulkan SDK but there should be no reason for the end-user to need to install a development kit to run a game. AMD, Nvidia and intel graphics driver contains the necessary run time dependency needed to run a vulkan application (as far as I know, I never programmed using vulkan). I tried using the run-time package from the LunarG web site with no luck.

The last two lines in the info window:
Willo_Core: [info] [Vulkan] ReadDataFilesInRegistry: Registry lookup failed to get layer manifest files.
Willo_Core: [info] [Vulkan] loaderValidateLayers: Layer 0 does not exist in the list of available layers.
🎤 Will Chambers
26. Apr 2021 · 22:46 UTC
@phealsout how long did you wait? I'm going to post a new build with substantially lower resolution textures, that should prevent the long load times.
🎤 Will Chambers
26. Apr 2021 · 23:18 UTC
@thebmxeur Thanks for the info! Sorry it wasn't working for you. I've looked into your debug messages, and I've posted a new download link labeled low-res. It fixes most of the performance issues that people have been running into, and I modified the Vulkan boot-up. However, you're mistaken on the graphics driver front! Vulkan has a piece of middleware called the Vulkan Loader, (hence the bit about the loader in the debug message) that comes with the Vulkan runtime, and is installed automatically by platforms like steam when you use them. However, since this is a from-scratch engine, I haven't written anything to do that, (I'm focused on the games) that said, I've posted a new version which should hopefully work with the runtime you have installed, as well as dramatically reduce load times! Please, check it out!
blockerz
27. Apr 2021 · 00:06 UTC
It did run for me but I am not sure how far I got into it. I could not really progress past the initial area.
🎤 Will Chambers
27. Apr 2021 · 00:17 UTC
@blockerz So glad you got it running! You CAN leave the first area, but it's not meant to be intuitive. Thanks for playing!
Jeremia
27. Apr 2021 · 07:56 UTC
@will-chambers the new low-res version is working for me.
thebmxeur
27. Apr 2021 · 10:44 UTC
@will-chambers I tried the updated version and it's working (without the vulkan run time...). I'm curious about what is taking so much memory as what I saw in the game was only text and on git hub there is only a 3 images (by the way, I wouldn't expect every body to have 6GB of VRAM currently, I don't have that). Also the git hub page doesn't seem to contain all the sources (I can't find the text I see in the game, assuming it's rendered on the fly).

For the game itself, it's really hard to play. I don't know if it's intended but it seems that I don't start the game facing the correct direction. After testing it several time, I'm facing the right direction but as soon as I move the mouse the direction changes completely (if I was facing north, I'm facing west or something), then I can look around normally. This happens whenever I go in a new "room", which makes it hard to follow the "dialogue". This also causes confusion because there is no distinction between the player text and the "narrator" text (like text color), so if I don't know what the narrator said, I can't really progress. Having the room bigger would probably improve the experience by making it easier to get the whole text in the screen and make it easier to navigate (a small movement wouldn't trigger a room change).

I can't exit the "As if anyone cares" room, whenever I go in the next room "What matters is who are you", I'm on the edge of the room and any more movement I do brings me back to the "As if anyone cares" room.

Several times I ended up in a state where it seems I was stuck between rooms, or on the edge of a room and the "outside" and couldn't get back to a playable state.

Whenever I exit the game, the game crashes.
mDuo13
28. Apr 2021 · 05:00 UTC
Oh hey, the low-res version runs on Linux (via WINE) too. It's a pretty interesting idea, almost like a really minimalistic Antichamber with more text.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of the same problems @thebmxeur did; I seem to get stuck on some screens where even though I am trying to move forward towards one line of dialogue it ends up looping me back to the previous room before I get there. In particular, going through the "As if Anyone Cares" line seems to jump me from new options back into the previous room with that, "As if I care" and lots of "GET OUT".

Like that "I'm yours" just tantalizingly out of reach (I get warped elsewhere when I try to approach it).
![2021-04-27_215732_108211705.png](///raw/c74/c3/z/41196.png)

It's too bad I can't get farther to experience more of the story, because I think it's a really fascinating premise.