play it here in your browser, 30-40 second download
https://www.newgrounds.com/projects/games/1821381/preview/filetype/2
You are locked in a library and need to put away books before you can leave. An otherwordly presence really doesn't want you to shelve those books. Avoid it, complete your objectives, and escape.
There is a map of the area on the wall of the starting room. If you complete the objectives the exit door is in the zone to the upper left of the map.
Please help our development team by testing and providing feedback about the game. If you have performance issues please post your processor, video card, and browser. Feel free to criticize and nitpick in as much detail as you want to post. All feedback is welcome including negative feedback.
known issues:
slight mouse drift in firefox-based browsers art is a work in progress
First, thanks for taking the time. It really is hugely appreciated.
That's just something that still needs work. We scrapped the initial level due to the performance constraints of URP + WebGL, so everything is still rather rough.
What would you rather have? Simple keypress, added to inventory type of thing, or something similar, just without the holding? Interaction was initially a larger part of the game, think Amnesia, but was scaled back when we discovered how constrained our development would be.
You're not the first, friend. Even within the team, not all of us noticed it. Something more prominent, or closer to eye height, as well as a brief rundown of what is expected definitely seems necessary.
Noted and already discussed. That'll get taken care of with set dressing.
Another discussion we've had. Unfortunately, the problem is the performance overhead. The best we could hope for, relying heavily on static batching, is an additional UV channel and say maybe 20 or so titles. The other option is to move away from conventional/readable names. We're leaning towards the latter. Thoughts?
Yep. WebGL projects are effectively single-threaded without SIMD. Anything up to API contact is quite expensive (2 - 2.5x slower than desktop, before considering SIMD). A lot of the means of optimizing rendering come with a notable CPU overhead, and where cutting into our frame-time. Compounding this is the fact that URP is a simple forward renderer, so you pretty much incur the cost of geometry for each light in its vicinity. While URP allegedly has directional lightmaps, in practice there is no specular contribution from baked indirect lighting, requiring a number of dynamic fill lights for normal maps to have any contribution.
So, entirely new assets as to allow ~95% of a frame to be drawn with 3 materials, and a layout with shorter sight-lines. Not as pretty, but passable performance. TLDR; I wouldn't recommend WebGL for anything more than the simplest of games. We're pretty much calling this a learning experience, and getting it out of the door before moving onto a more serious desktop project.
That's actually in already. Right clicking while carrying a book throws it, and will distract the enemy if it isn't in a pursuit state. Crouching/sprinting, the effect that has on sound propagation, lights effect on visibility etc; That all needs to be covered in a brief tutorial. We'll be looking into stunning the AI, though.
For the next test, we'll see how people fair with a short textual tutorial. If that's not enough, then this, definitely.
Yeah, colored indicators for the various sections, coupled with illuminated exit signs. A proper map will be included as well, along with local lighting in the start room to make it and the objectives board more noticeable.
That's certainly possible for the interactable books, not so much for the static ones though since GPU instancing is significantly more expensive than static batching in WebGL. Unfortunately, the overlay approach would reduce visual quality since you're effectively limited to shifting values, not hue. One could look into multi-channel masks, or curve based albedo reconstruction, but that's pretty time consuming to get right and possibly outside of our performance budget.
We actually have some book variations (both in shape and color), and there is still space in that texture atlas, so we could offer at least 8 design variations. We just forgot to randomize the mesh selection for objective spawns... Would you be happy with that?
Agreed. Small props and set dressing are still to come, and will resolve this to a degree. We just have to balance the relative importance of what we add. 120MB, including engine, for a game utilizing baked lighting and targeting a reasonable texel density doesn't leave a lot of room for variety.
Yeah, haha.
The first time I started it up I saw the monster and walked straight to it to get a look and see what happens.
The monster kinda bugged out, shaking in place while I stood next to it.
Finally it turned around and ran away.
It didn't seem to have the ability to turn and face towards me, it would swipe at thin air when I was standing to the side.
But eventually I seemed to just die after it swung at the air for a while, even though there was no indication that I was being harmed at all.