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
Thanks a lot for playing and for the detailed feedback. We know there is still work to do and this kind of playtesting is exactly what we need.
A throwback to a more extensive, Amnesia inspired interaction system that was scrapped. For the time being, that'll likely stay, albeit with an option to not have to hold the mouse button.
There's a sound prompt at present, but we'll extend the interaction icons to indicate what doors are interactable, as well as indicate the need to drag doors open.
Already present, although the implementation needs some work. We'll probably move to a generalized brightness slider that shifts a number of grading parameters between two profiles to try and alleviate some of the washout.
Agreed. We have an improved version that'll make it into the next test.
We'll be adding local lighting fixtures to draw attention to both the objectives board and the map, and a short textual description of the game loop in the menu.
Shelf placement and category distribution are still in flux. Once finalized, those will be taken care of.
We had discussed a flashlight and will likely be adding one. Establishing a decent night ambience while maintaining the degree of visibility required by the game loop is proving difficult. I like the idea of recharging though.
Unfortunately, the point lights have to stay. URP's directional lightmaps are... not great. They are providing next to no specular contribution, which effectively removes normal mapping without additional fill lights.
Already present to a degree, but limited to distracting the AI. We'll look into stunning.
In closing, thanks for taking the time. The constructive criticism is really helpful.
I know it's supposed to be dark, and maybe I didn't look around enough, but a flashlight or the option to adjust the brightness would help. My room is usually pretty bright from the sun, and dark games can be just invisible.
Only other thing I picked up in 15mins of messing around is the ability to hold a book and operate doors, etc. at the same time would be nice. I'll give it a shot more sometime, it didn't run that great on my browser in Linux, but that could very well be my own fault.
If all those graphics are custom, they look quite nice, great job.
Edit since you asked: Brave in Ubuntu 21.10, GPU is a Radeon HD7970. I'm probably a bit underpowered. I'll try it on my Windows 10 mini PC sometime.
We have a basic gamma slider in the options, but will look into adding a flashlight.
They are, thanks.
During internal testing we noticed some performance issues with Brave. We're looking into it, but unfortunately as with all web development, one is ultimately a slave to vendor implementations.
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?
Right?
According to the documentation, directional lightmapping is supported. I haven't tried HDRP, but in practice, the contribution in URP is negligible in scenes with a lot of soft indirect lighting on desktop was well. The built in lightmapping is quite poor in general. We considered a 3rd party plugin that resolves these issues, but given the overall project constraints, such investments are arguably a matter of diminishing returns.
To clarify, if you don't have to hold LMB to carry a book, tapping the bottom right corner wouldn't be a problem, right?
We discussed this at some point, but the concern was people missing the tutorial. I personally really like that kind of immersive, in world explanation. It's just a bit of a gamble. We could include a tutorial both in the menu, and on the desk.
We can extend those variations to both since it's just a matter of UV coords, although the actual arrangement of the books on the shelves may need to remain constant (as they current are)
It doesn't appear to be version specific. We've tested newer builds since URP recently added some PS2-era innovations like decals and light cookies which we understandably wanted. Unfortunately, they also introduced some show-stopping WebGL shader compilation issues...
As it stands, "directional lightmaps" are supported, but I believe specular contribution has been deprecated, which is bizarre. I've always known directional lightmapping to refer to RNM, which was conceived to address this issue in the early 2000's.
Nice idea. We'll play around with it as time allows internally, and see how fresh eyes respond in the next release.
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.
Really don't like horror games, but poked around with it a bit.
In my mind, the atmosphere works well, though I did "cheat" once and turn the brightness all the way up.
Will partially agree with others on holding the mouse button being annoying. I think requiring it for the books is OK, but it took me a bit to even get out of the first room since I was just clicking the door instead of click and dragging.
The biggest change I would make it adding some indicators to the books you need to pick up, and the destination slot. Took me like 30 seconds or so of slowly moving the cursor over every single item in the section to locate the book I needed to grab. And similarly, when asked to shelve a book it took a bit to actually locate the slot it was supposed to go which was, on the surface, no different than any of the other slots. Maybe having them flash occasionally or something would help.
We'll be adding an interaction icon that indicates the need to drag the doors, to begin with.
We discussed this briefly after receiving feedback. We'll likely tie the degree of affordance to the difficulty setting, with easy having a persistent glow to indicate both objective books and return slots.
Walked around for ten minutes. Didn't see a single book I could pick up. Gave up.
Did you see the objective list in the starting room?
Yes.
We could explain that better but Shelve means take a book from the desk and put it on the right shelf and Return means find a book on the right shelf and put it into the return shelf of the starting room
I saw one open book on the table but couldn't interact with it.
On the subject, I find the wording of the instructions awkward.
I feel like it should say return books to their section, not from.
edit:
Ok, I found the book i'm supposed to return.
It was so dark, and standing on its side which is not something books do by themselves, that I didn't even realize it was a book the first time round.
So when i loaded into the game it was so dark I couldn't see anything.
I was happy to see there's a brightness control but I think you might want to give that another pass.
It says to adjust until the image on the left is barely visible.
There's only one image, it is on the right.
And making it barely visible makes the entire game barely visible.
On the instructions, I'm seeing objectives 2 and 5 in the exact same color, as well as objectives 3 and 4. So I don't know which section of the map those are supposed to go to.
Hmm, while I was typing this up and went back to the menu and started over and now all the objectives are different colors.
The map leaves a bit to be desired.
Could really use one of those "you are here" markers.
edit:
Reloaded again and this time 4 and 5 are the same color.
Wait, does that mean they're just in the same section of the map?
Oh well, doesn't matter. No book spawned for me to return.
No mater how many times I reload, no book ever spawns now.
ty much for feedback, we are hopefully going to have a new version up this weekend that fixes most of this stuff