Otherworldly Stars by Sam Twidale
In Otherworldly Stars you are an evil fire God with a bad case of amnesia. You are summoned back to your shrine with no memory - and so go forth searching for your disciples, trying to gather your memories.
The game has a graphical style inspired by Ludum Dare 29 entry Beneath The Cave by feiss and the iOS game Alto's Adventure by Snowman. It was written using Haxe, targeting JavaScript/WebGL. It requires a recent graphics card and modern browser to run at all, and probably needs a fast computer to run at full speed.
For those without these things, here is a playthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxFP0QTp4XI
Controls are just point and click and arrow key movement. There was going to be some bullet hell and a longer story with multiple runthroughs of the game as you atoned for your past sins, but time ran out - so it's an incomplete narrative, and there's not much in the way of gameplay.
CONTROLS
========
The game requires keyboard and mouse. In case you miss the instruction, you use the left and right arrow keys to move, and mouse hover and click to interact.
IMPORTANT NOTES
===============
* There is no audio, that's not a bug - I wanted to avoid problems with cross-browser compatibility, and ran out of time in any case.
* The sky shader code is a derivative of the three.js sky shader example: http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_shaders_sky - I did not write that shader from scratch in 48 hours.
* There is a bug that causes slight blips with particle systems on Chrome. This does not to happen with Firefox or IE, so I recommend playing on those instead.
* I (attempted to) fix an annoying bug that made the text disappear sometimes, reported by players after the jam ended.
CREATED WITH
============
* The Haxe Programming language.
* three.js for rendering with Haxe externs.
* Joshua Granick's actuate tweening library.
* Luke Moody's ShaderParticleEngine for three.js.
* Massive Interactive's msignal signals library.
The game has a graphical style inspired by Ludum Dare 29 entry Beneath The Cave by feiss and the iOS game Alto's Adventure by Snowman. It was written using Haxe, targeting JavaScript/WebGL. It requires a recent graphics card and modern browser to run at all, and probably needs a fast computer to run at full speed.
For those without these things, here is a playthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxFP0QTp4XI
Controls are just point and click and arrow key movement. There was going to be some bullet hell and a longer story with multiple runthroughs of the game as you atoned for your past sins, but time ran out - so it's an incomplete narrative, and there's not much in the way of gameplay.
CONTROLS
========
The game requires keyboard and mouse. In case you miss the instruction, you use the left and right arrow keys to move, and mouse hover and click to interact.
IMPORTANT NOTES
===============
* There is no audio, that's not a bug - I wanted to avoid problems with cross-browser compatibility, and ran out of time in any case.
* The sky shader code is a derivative of the three.js sky shader example: http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_shaders_sky - I did not write that shader from scratch in 48 hours.
* There is a bug that causes slight blips with particle systems on Chrome. This does not to happen with Firefox or IE, so I recommend playing on those instead.
* I (attempted to) fix an annoying bug that made the text disappear sometimes, reported by players after the jam ended.
CREATED WITH
============
* The Haxe Programming language.
* three.js for rendering with Haxe externs.
* Joshua Granick's actuate tweening library.
* Luke Moody's ShaderParticleEngine for three.js.
* Massive Interactive's msignal signals library.
| Web | http://samcodes.itch.io/otherworldly-stars |
| Sky Editor (post compo) | http://samcodes.itch.io/sky-shader-editor |
| Source | https://github.com/Tw1ddle/Ludum-Dare-33 |
| Sky Editor Source (post compo) | https://github.com/Tw1ddle/Sky-Particles-Shader |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=42276 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 79% | 2 |
| Overall | 2.91 | 669 |
| Fun | 2.11 | 900 |
| Graphics | 4.11 | 71 |
| Humor | 1.75 | 777 |
| Innovation | 2.92 | 515 |
| Mood | 3.59 | 125 |
| Theme | 2.91 | 736 |
The visual spectacle was executed brilliantly - the ever darkening night sky really is exceptionally pretty.
Unfortunately, the story was hampered by a bit of buggy text - I found that, when entering a new screen, the story chunk that was tied to it would sometimes cut off, and I would have to leave the screen and come back in order to read what it said.
Also drat, that bug... I think that's owing to the mouse picking up some "examinable" object that shouldn't be there when the camera jerks between screens. Oh well!
was confused if its a story narrative or game after i went right for several screens and nothing happened.
Pros:
-Excellent artstyle & effects
-Interesting story
Cons:
-Buggy text :P
I just updated the game to hopefully fix the text disappearing bug. Reading the submission FAQ I'm gathering that's OK for annoying little things like that.
The text placement made it a bit hard to both look at the game and the story at the same time though. And it would have been nice if there were a few more lines of 'history' so you could finish reading something if you accidentally made new text appear.
Adding a scroll-back text history would have been a good idea. Agree just having one line visible at the bottom isn't great. I tried using the tweening text shown at the intro sequence for all the narrative text at first, but the problem was that every letter was a 3D mesh, and so I figure that would require recycling/pooling of meshes to perform well. With more time I would have done that.
Next time I'll put more time aside to get proper gameplay in and working.
I wish there was more to the story, but I'll readily accept that you were going for understatement (or maybe I missed something).
my biggest issue is that your controls make it very hard to play on a trackpad. consider letting the user choose between wasd/arrow keys for games need both keyboard and mouse input (this is what i do in my game).
i think your particles are nice, but if i'm being completely honest i think they look a little bit generic. i spend a lot of time looking at particle effects though so it could just be me.
i think the game could have used some smoother controls (e.g. as it is you just move left if left is down and right if right is down, theres no momentum/velocity). that said, this is a very minor given that this is not an action game.
p.s. you mentioned not using audio because of browser issues and i recommend howler.js for handling those. i am not a guy who uses a lot of libraries but that one has worked well for me multiple times. i believe you would have to write haxe bindings for it however (or port it to haxe).
I know you said there was supposed to be a bullet hell but, I think this game would work much better as the adventure of an angry and lost god trying to regain his memory and atone. Maybe the bullet hell could be a small section, like reliving some of his past, but the main draw for me for this game is the adventure, discovering and talking and finding things out. Great work! And love that it's made with Haxe!
Beautiful graphics - Michael Bay approves ;) (*sparkle* *blaze* *shimmers)
Funny how the gradually appearing centered text is not at all annoying, and actually makes it pretty easy to read. Reminds me of that speedreading thing that would flash one word at a time.
Regarding cross-browser audio: I strongly recommend Howler.js -- assuming you can talk to JavaScript from Haxe. Been using it for all my past LD entries, works flawlessly on any browser I or anyone else threw it at.
Agree the particle effects were a little basic, simple graphics and basic physics. Would have used noise or some sort of flow field with some more time.
Even though the physics of the engine is superficial, the bouncing is a nice touch, showing off the effects of the trailing god-particles (which quite appropriately defy gravity).
If you decide to do a post-jam with dodgeables/catchables, I think you could definitely stick with bouncing movement (always on, sort of an "even-gods-must-follows-rules" thing), just a tad of acceleration from the up/down arrow keys for more motion control. Stick in some pixel-sized people subject to divine wrath (smite via squashing?), a bit of alternate dialogue if you can avoid squashing them (something about resisting the urge to punish one's subjects), maybe power-ups to increase/decrease size and an alternate ending for the skilled pacifist?
Bottom line: Despite your disclaimer, it seems to me this is just a few tweaks from being a complete game! Well done!