The font? The art style? The fluidity on a mobile device? It's fantastic.
I wasn't able to deliver packages but I was too mesmerized to be mad about that. Beautiful game. Kudos.
Edit: I did figure it out and completed all the deliveries. So many potential. It reminds me a bit of Sky by thatgamecompany
Edit 2: for the author, I noticed several players approached me and tried to communicate. Please explore games like Journey (thatgamecompany) to see different ways people communicate without chatting. People can help each other, veterans can guide newbies all without using words. Every time I met a player in the game back in the days, they sent me a heartfelt message.
It really is lovely. I had the same thought about refining interactions a bit -- I would also suggest Meadow by Might & Delight as an example of nonverbal communication done well.
If you have a keyboard, then upper keys 1-2...9-0 do all the emojis as hotkeys. Ex, 9 does the takeout food, which is probably meant to be "busy, eating" or something similar.
The game is wonderful and I'm so glad it doesn't have chat! My 9yo niece and I played it through side by side and if it had chat or consistent remote player presence that wouldn't have been appropriate.
Absolutely - I love those. I wonder if there are any other simple web games like this that run on mobile with more nuanced interplayer comms as you suggest.
Hearthstone (while not web-based) is a deck building game that you play against others and you can only communicate with a small set of inoffensive phrases that cover broad sentiments. Makes multiplayer endurable, and you can turn them off if you like.
The game doesn't really explain that too well. You have to go find the packages first before you can deliver it. For example the old lady asks you to deliver an offering at a temple.
I also didn't really understand how to do it, but I liked the game, it's so beautiful and peaceful, it's a shame there's no chat and you have to speak through emojis.
Some people have an arrow on top of their head, and when you approach them there is a dialog balloon with "...". If you click on them they give you a task.
@thecupisblue. Amazing work. Logged in just to tell you this. This has just given me goose bumps and made me excited about the web again. I’ve been struggling to find my groove in the dev world post AI and have been digging back into AR and WebXR just for the fun of it. Thank you for the game and more importantly the renewed inspiration to make something cool!
This is like a masterclass in game design, mobile UI, wasm, character design, game dialogue and interactive paychogeography. I'm gonna show this to my kid's computer club next week. Really fantastic, bravo. Is this seriously a solo developer project??
If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..
Haven't played Obra Dinn yet (it's on my list of games to play together with my wife), but anything by its developer Lucas Pope is a masterpiece. Papers Please, while it infuriated me at times (apparently I suck at following rules and spotting differences) was just amazing. Available on mobile and PC.
I can echo everyone here in saying the graphics of the game and the execution is fantastic. The keyboard controls on desktop and the thumb control on mobile works great. This got me very excited about the future! Can’t imagine the amount of effort that would have gone in this.
One additional input, although I could play it well on the desktop - the mobile gameplay made me a tad nauseous. I am someone prone to nausea in VR too, but I’ve never felt this in any other mobile game before. I think it’s probably the amount of motion (hilly topography) and the very narrow field of view, along with the way the mobile controls behave. This was on iOS Safari btw (iPhone 16 Pro Max).
It's really unique and beautiful. I want to see more of this. I grew up with random interactive experiences in Flash, this is far more amazing that those days but we need more of this and less of the form crud crap.
Love all of it except for the camera controls on iOS. Not sure how you could improve them but they need some work. Camera gets too close to the character a lot. Might consider two touch controls that separate movement direction and camera position.
Loved the artstyle, but controls... uhh... let's say they were on par with a bad PC port of Sonic Adventure. I can barely control where I'm going, because the camera just rotates randomly. Something I'll never miss from the old days.
The controls are the only gripe I have with this amazing work.
If I was in Unity, I would address this issue by manually placing a bunch of virtual cameras in the world and using cinemachine to blend between them. The size of this world is small enough to justify manual placement and configuration of each. You could also just focus on the complex areas and let the default follow cam handle the rest.
But I kind of understand it. I did a somehow similar project before and for people who are not trained in video game style controls it is quite hard to get used to them ad-hoc.
Assuming this project is at least partially aimed at art directors, project leads and such aka people who aren't necessarily gamers, detached movement/camera controls are a bit risky.
The mouse look was actually something I was kind of wanting wandering around.
There were a lot of cool scenic locations, that almost beg for the ability to just stand somewhere and look around, yet you can't really look down or up very conveniently.
Also, walking locations where you might fall, be kind of nice to be able to look at where you're aiming at. Minor nit mostly, just fit the explore a scenic island theme.
There is some level of mouse look. I suspect together with not locking the cursor/the cursor leaving the window, this is part of why people report issues.
The camera, controls, and difficult to discern invisible walls were frustrating to the point I had to just quit the game, even after completing over half of the deliveries. On Safari on macOS there is also a glitch where the character’s clothes keep changing, and I can’t see any other players there (it was only when I tried it on iOS that I realised this is Journey-like).
But the game is beautiful and peaceful and I’m still glad I got to experience it. I’ll definitely share it with some friends. Thank you for making it.
The one thing that transported me out of the game was the arbitrary blocking around the ocean / the end of the stream. (I assume those go to the same place, from different sides.)
It seems on such a tiny world the water should never be more than waist deep, so why not just let us explore the whole thing. I didn't quite feel like I got to go all the way around the tiny world, and being fenced by an invisible barrier broke the fourth wall.
It could use a tutorial but this is probably the first time that I didn't care about the actual aim of the game because of how beautifully it looks and sounds. I could just run around in your little world forever and feel nice. It's really well done.
Am sitting at a game jam right now and took a break to browse HN. Found this and started playing for a bit. Now everyone is asking about it, this is a really polished and fun WebGL game. Amazing!
I found movement controls rotated too aggressively on mobile in portrait mode. Switching my phone to landscape orientation made it easier to control, but the url bar was then stuck along the top.
I'm curious how you build something like this. I see file types in the network tab which, as a web dev, I've never worked with before. ktx2 and drc extensions, for example. I'm also seeing some wasm and threejs. Is there an engine that outputs these things or is it more of a manual process to bring everything together?
ktx is Khronos Texture a format for storing compressed textures (=image data) so that they can be uploaded to GPU memory without decompressing step inbetween
drc is Draco Compression, it's a library from Google to compress mesh data
KTX can just store compressed GPU textures as-is, but in this case they're using the Basis Universal codec which is a bit more involved. Basis stores textures in a super-compressed form, which is decompressed at runtime to produce a less compressed (but still compressed!) format that the GPU can work with. The advantage is that it's smaller over the wire and one source file can decompress to several different GPU formats depending on what the users hardware supports.
Having done some non-trivial things with threejs, I'd guess it's basically like this: 3JS is the rendering engine (taking advantage of WebGL); game logic is in Javascript; ktx2 is an OpenGL container holding the world data and other meshes; from looking at the filenames, WASM bits are used for loading the ktx2 data (draco_decoder.wasm). ogg files are for sound. The multiple worker files imply that the app is using web workers to run the WASM performantly to load the world.
I appreciate what seems like an attempt to make a "smart camera" that gets out of the way of the player and unburdens them from having to control both a player and the perspective of the camera. That burden, of controlling two entities (player and camera) is large for people who are unused to playing video games.
Was this dynamic on your radar when building the game and camera system? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Modern camera systems are often smart in this way. Zelda Ocarina of Time on the N64 was one of the first (if not the first) that got "out of the way" by itself.
Beautiful. You can just tell when things are made with the core premise of how they wanted someone to FEEL playing it. Not some lore, not some "cool" gameplay ideas they had, not some fancy gfx concept they'd prototyped. It just feels different when you know it's been approached from a completely emotional perspective.
Awesome game, the graphics especially were nicely made. The cel shading (iirc) went well with the art style.
Played through all missions and at the end had enough of the concept but appreciated the AOD. Especially the little bits of the environment, like the sleeping fox in the forest, were nice.
Agreed with everything said here about the beauty. I found the camera controls pretty clumsy though. I played in portrait, landscape probably would work better.
I love the art style, and it plays super smoothly on mobile! No tutorial, but the controls are so intuitive that I didn't need one (joystick touch control that's in almost every 3D mobile game). The sense of exploration and discovery is pretty fun.
Pretty damn cool experience. Definitely the most polished browser game I've tried. The limited scope really makes it fantastic and since it's such a small vertical slice the world feels very full of detail. The art style is fantastic as well.
This is stunning, and I adore it. I had an idea to build a game set on a tiny planet but I never even started, and here you have created something that's awe-inspiring. keep it up!
Was having fun. Completed all but the scientist objective as I couldn't find the last person. I found what looked to be a hidden location and as the person there said "Hello" it crashed the page. oof.
Happy to find out it remembered my progress. And I found the final delivery and completed the game. And yes, I'm sure the girl on the roof is a 'hidden' thing. She talks about three.js, game development, and art.
Besides the visual style being very similar, there's an island in the game with about the same amount of NPCs, and they all have their own lives and many give you chores like this one.
* there should be a help section, all i could figure out is how to walk with up/left/down/right, and w/a/s/d. And the mouse.
* I got nauseous after a bit, not sure if that is everyone or just me but I did have some bad nausea on a ride (teacups) at the local carnival/fair a few months ago, and it comes back every now and then.
* the controls on desktop seem too sensitive. I had to eventually walk with W and then go left and right with the arrow keys, but even then it was too sensitive
I also got nausea from this game and I've never gotten nausea from a video game before. The style is amazing, but the camera controls need some work. I don't know what the camera needs besides a more standard mouse control.
same. sensitivity of the camera is just too high. it handles ok but so much sensitivity creates this motion sickness. had to quit after 30 seconds and I still can’t recover. but beautiful game though!
Idea for letting the player move the camera alone: Top 1/3 portion of the screen is for camera movement alone, bottom 2/3 keep as is for player movement
this is the most cute, beautiful shit i've seen all year. i love the fact that there are other players everywhere, since it's so convenient to dive into it via browser.
Decentraleyes extension on Firefox results in garbled text. Not sure why this happens. It is supposed to serve some common assets locally instead of requesting them over the network.
Love the design and concept of a tiny planet - reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy in that way. Definitely needs a tutorial or a short “How to Play” dialog or page.
Second this. Pretty much standard/intuitive controls, it was fun discovering what the game was about while captivated by the beautiful music and graphics.
not likely to be your problem, but if you are using firefox resist fingerprinting, you need to whitelist most webgl apps that use large textures, since resist fingerprinting forces a standard texture size that is a bit on the small side. or maybe your machine is really old and you're hitting same problem for real. the game doesn't really detect errors.
I'm not sure if they are real people. I started two sessions and I didn't see my other self, despite being in the same location. Also, both times, the starting place was the same. If that would be the case for everyone, there would be many people there who just start the game.
yes, thanks! i was unsure whether to include it because it looks quite different. but you are right, it has the similar exploratory vibe and is a great game.
The font? The art style? The fluidity on a mobile device? It's fantastic.
I wasn't able to deliver packages but I was too mesmerized to be mad about that. Beautiful game. Kudos.
Edit: I did figure it out and completed all the deliveries. So many potential. It reminds me a bit of Sky by thatgamecompany
Edit 2: for the author, I noticed several players approached me and tried to communicate. Please explore games like Journey (thatgamecompany) to see different ways people communicate without chatting. People can help each other, veterans can guide newbies all without using words. Every time I met a player in the game back in the days, they sent me a heartfelt message.
It really is lovely. I had the same thought about refining interactions a bit -- I would also suggest Meadow by Might & Delight as an example of nonverbal communication done well.
You can communicate by sending emojis with the menu in the bottom right.
If you have a keyboard, then upper keys 1-2...9-0 do all the emojis as hotkeys. Ex, 9 does the takeout food, which is probably meant to be "busy, eating" or something similar.
I think it's the curvature of the world that's making it run so well on mobile. There's never to much models on-screen to draw.
I had a great time jumping around and some other runners joined me and I realized I wasn't the only one playing. We began to communicate via jumping.
Reminds me of dancing with random strangers in "Playstaion Home" on the PS3
The game is wonderful and I'm so glad it doesn't have chat! My 9yo niece and I played it through side by side and if it had chat or consistent remote player presence that wouldn't have been appropriate.
That's why I suggested other means of communication other than chat.
Absolutely - I love those. I wonder if there are any other simple web games like this that run on mobile with more nuanced interplayer comms as you suggest.
Hearthstone (while not web-based) is a deck building game that you play against others and you can only communicate with a small set of inoffensive phrases that cover broad sentiments. Makes multiplayer endurable, and you can turn them off if you like.
There's a poop symbol on the bottom right, click it to see ways to communicate.
I was surprised to learn the random messengers are other humans!
You need to click on npc to start conversation, one of them is office worker, he will give you a delivery
I thought it could be operated entirely from the keyboard, thanks for the tip on clicking! lol
I played for a few minutes. I wasn't able to deliver packages either.
The game doesn't really explain that too well. You have to go find the packages first before you can deliver it. For example the old lady asks you to deliver an offering at a temple.
I also didn't really understand how to do it, but I liked the game, it's so beautiful and peaceful, it's a shame there's no chat and you have to speak through emojis.
Some people have an arrow on top of their head, and when you approach them there is a dialog balloon with "...". If you click on them they give you a task.
Thanks
@thecupisblue. Amazing work. Logged in just to tell you this. This has just given me goose bumps and made me excited about the web again. I’ve been struggling to find my groove in the dev world post AI and have been digging back into AR and WebXR just for the fun of it. Thank you for the game and more importantly the renewed inspiration to make something cool!
WebXR is massively underrated
This is like a masterclass in game design, mobile UI, wasm, character design, game dialogue and interactive paychogeography. I'm gonna show this to my kid's computer club next week. Really fantastic, bravo. Is this seriously a solo developer project??
If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..
Return of the Obra Dinn!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra...
Haven't played Obra Dinn yet (it's on my list of games to play together with my wife), but anything by its developer Lucas Pope is a masterpiece. Papers Please, while it infuriated me at times (apparently I suck at following rules and spotting differences) was just amazing. Available on mobile and PC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please
I can echo everyone here in saying the graphics of the game and the execution is fantastic. The keyboard controls on desktop and the thumb control on mobile works great. This got me very excited about the future! Can’t imagine the amount of effort that would have gone in this.
One additional input, although I could play it well on the desktop - the mobile gameplay made me a tad nauseous. I am someone prone to nausea in VR too, but I’ve never felt this in any other mobile game before. I think it’s probably the amount of motion (hilly topography) and the very narrow field of view, along with the way the mobile controls behave. This was on iOS Safari btw (iPhone 16 Pro Max).
Yes I had to take a break due to the game making me feel off, but then I came back later and managed to finish it
It's really unique and beautiful. I want to see more of this. I grew up with random interactive experiences in Flash, this is far more amazing that those days but we need more of this and less of the form crud crap.
I spent more time enjoying the graphics and style than actually playing. it runs so well on a mobile device, I've never seen something like this.
as for the game itself, I couldn't understand how to deliver the messages.
I have a cheap android phone that's 4 years old. This game is still playable. Very impressive!
Thank you, I thought it was just me .
Reminds me of Jet Set Radio
Love all of it except for the camera controls on iOS. Not sure how you could improve them but they need some work. Camera gets too close to the character a lot. Might consider two touch controls that separate movement direction and camera position.
Agreed. Same for movement. It’s a little too hard to run straight sometimes.
Too sensitive on the turning
Loved the artstyle, but controls... uhh... let's say they were on par with a bad PC port of Sonic Adventure. I can barely control where I'm going, because the camera just rotates randomly. Something I'll never miss from the old days.
The controls are the only gripe I have with this amazing work.
If I was in Unity, I would address this issue by manually placing a bunch of virtual cameras in the world and using cinemachine to blend between them. The size of this world is small enough to justify manual placement and configuration of each. You could also just focus on the complex areas and let the default follow cam handle the rest.
This really wants to be controlled by twin thumbsticks.
..or mouse for camera.
But I kind of understand it. I did a somehow similar project before and for people who are not trained in video game style controls it is quite hard to get used to them ad-hoc.
Assuming this project is at least partially aimed at art directors, project leads and such aka people who aren't necessarily gamers, detached movement/camera controls are a bit risky.
The mouse look was actually something I was kind of wanting wandering around.
There were a lot of cool scenic locations, that almost beg for the ability to just stand somewhere and look around, yet you can't really look down or up very conveniently.
Also, walking locations where you might fall, be kind of nice to be able to look at where you're aiming at. Minor nit mostly, just fit the explore a scenic island theme.
There is some level of mouse look. I suspect together with not locking the cursor/the cursor leaving the window, this is part of why people report issues.
Woah, is this the same author as
https://summer-afternoon.vlucendo.com
?
Love the beach guy makes an appearance in both.
I remember that. What a talent.
well spotted! seems to be the case: https://x.com/vlucendo/status/1971219342231732516
I noticed the movement UI style was the same
controlling movement is much easier. Something is wrong with the movement in the OP game, at least on a browers
Feels about the same to me, I think the map is just more open on this one so the camera is less likely to be pointed somewhere annoying.
The alien sunbathing at the beach is a nice wink.
Beautiful, thanks for sharing!
I think people are confused that they have to deliver packages they already possess. Instead the instructions should read…
“Explore and Make Deliveries”
The camera, controls, and difficult to discern invisible walls were frustrating to the point I had to just quit the game, even after completing over half of the deliveries. On Safari on macOS there is also a glitch where the character’s clothes keep changing, and I can’t see any other players there (it was only when I tried it on iOS that I realised this is Journey-like).
But the game is beautiful and peaceful and I’m still glad I got to experience it. I’ll definitely share it with some friends. Thank you for making it.
Really beautiful! Love the artwork and the fact that this runs so well in the browser. Was surprised to realize it was multiplayer!
Beautiful, as others have said.
The one thing that transported me out of the game was the arbitrary blocking around the ocean / the end of the stream. (I assume those go to the same place, from different sides.)
It seems on such a tiny world the water should never be more than waist deep, so why not just let us explore the whole thing. I didn't quite feel like I got to go all the way around the tiny world, and being fenced by an invisible barrier broke the fourth wall.
This is the loveliest thing I've ever seen on the web. The feeling of being immediately immersed in a universe. A work of art.
It could use a tutorial but this is probably the first time that I didn't care about the actual aim of the game because of how beautifully it looks and sounds. I could just run around in your little world forever and feel nice. It's really well done.
Am sitting at a game jam right now and took a break to browse HN. Found this and started playing for a bit. Now everyone is asking about it, this is a really polished and fun WebGL game. Amazing!
I found movement controls rotated too aggressively on mobile in portrait mode. Switching my phone to landscape orientation made it easier to control, but the url bar was then stuck along the top.
Beautiful. Feels like the Japan of 90s Studio Ghibli movies.
I'm curious how you build something like this. I see file types in the network tab which, as a web dev, I've never worked with before. ktx2 and drc extensions, for example. I'm also seeing some wasm and threejs. Is there an engine that outputs these things or is it more of a manual process to bring everything together?
ktx is Khronos Texture a format for storing compressed textures (=image data) so that they can be uploaded to GPU memory without decompressing step inbetween
drc is Draco Compression, it's a library from Google to compress mesh data
KTX can just store compressed GPU textures as-is, but in this case they're using the Basis Universal codec which is a bit more involved. Basis stores textures in a super-compressed form, which is decompressed at runtime to produce a less compressed (but still compressed!) format that the GPU can work with. The advantage is that it's smaller over the wire and one source file can decompress to several different GPU formats depending on what the users hardware supports.
ktx2 = textures
drc = 3d shapes (I think)
ogg = audio
All of these would normally be bundled in the game installer, but are sent down piece by piece over the network in this case.
Then there's some wasm and js for the game's business logic. The browser has WebGL APIs that enable running all of this.
I'm assuming they used a library or engine like Unity, Godot or Three.js that supports WebGL as an execution target.
The NPC at the top of the building sais it's three.js
Definitely Three.js or at least something similarly low-level. I doubt you can get this kind of performance with Godot or Unity on the web.
There is Needle.Tools for porting Unity projects to WebGL/3js
Having done some non-trivial things with threejs, I'd guess it's basically like this: 3JS is the rendering engine (taking advantage of WebGL); game logic is in Javascript; ktx2 is an OpenGL container holding the world data and other meshes; from looking at the filenames, WASM bits are used for loading the ktx2 data (draco_decoder.wasm). ogg files are for sound. The multiple worker files imply that the app is using web workers to run the WASM performantly to load the world.
Threejs is like the jQuery for building 3d stuff. But it's not a platform like Unity or Unreal engine. But it doesn't look overly complicated.
I appreciate what seems like an attempt to make a "smart camera" that gets out of the way of the player and unburdens them from having to control both a player and the perspective of the camera. That burden, of controlling two entities (player and camera) is large for people who are unused to playing video games.
Was this dynamic on your radar when building the game and camera system? Would love to hear your thoughts.
I'd rather have the choice to control the camera (the "smart" camera could be used only if I don't control it), because it didn't work well for me.
Nice game otherwise.
Modern camera systems are often smart in this way. Zelda Ocarina of Time on the N64 was one of the first (if not the first) that got "out of the way" by itself.
Beautiful. I especially like how *obviously* Japanese the village looks.
Amazing! I've never seen a game with this artstyle, really, really classy!
This is absolutely adorable. I love the art style and the vibe. I love the tiny planet concept. Great work.
Gorgeous. Would love to know how they managed to create a reliably good-looking outline post processing shader with notches (the sketched look).
Also visit their main site: https://abeto.co/ . The animation is mind-blowing.
It's not obvious how to access any content on that page? The animation is cool though.
Beautiful. You can just tell when things are made with the core premise of how they wanted someone to FEEL playing it. Not some lore, not some "cool" gameplay ideas they had, not some fancy gfx concept they'd prototyped. It just feels different when you know it's been approached from a completely emotional perspective.
Awesome game, the graphics especially were nicely made. The cel shading (iirc) went well with the art style.
Played through all missions and at the end had enough of the concept but appreciated the AOD. Especially the little bits of the environment, like the sleeping fox in the forest, were nice.
Great game. Had to quit as it's giving me motion sickness.
How do you solve the second mission (the man that is hiding somewhere)? I've managed to find even the three.js mention, but nothing to start that one.
He's in a cave near the forest. Turn right when you see the tree stump with the owl on it.
Agreed with everything said here about the beauty. I found the camera controls pretty clumsy though. I played in portrait, landscape probably would work better.
Yeah the camera's horrible. I found myself snaking left and right just trying to walk in a straight line.
Isn't this how camera in these games always used to work? You have to nudge your character to control it.
I love the art style, and it plays super smoothly on mobile! No tutorial, but the controls are so intuitive that I didn't need one (joystick touch control that's in almost every 3D mobile game). The sense of exploration and discovery is pretty fun.
Pretty damn cool experience. Definitely the most polished browser game I've tried. The limited scope really makes it fantastic and since it's such a small vertical slice the world feels very full of detail. The art style is fantastic as well.
It took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize it was a font of readable text and not just random glyphs. I like the style of them.
i don't know if it is a browser issue, but on firefox the text in messages is invisible.
Worked fine for me, even on Linux. Maybe you have some sort of blocker extension?
It will be nice to know more about how this was made.
The creator's web site says nothing:
https://abeto.co/
Their Twitter has three posts:
https://xcancel.com/abeto_co
Three of the people behind it:
https://xcancel.com/vlucendo
https://xcancel.com/michaelsungaila
https://kevincolombin.bandcamp.com/
It say nothing but boy what a beautiful website
Took me way to long too realize the other in-world delivery people were other players and not NPCs
This is stunning, and I adore it. I had an idea to build a game set on a tiny planet but I never even started, and here you have created something that's awe-inspiring. keep it up!
Absolutely stunning experience. The way the houses rolled over the hill as I walked. Incredible.
This is beautiful, kudos. I'm more than interested to read about the building process of this masterpiece.
Beautiful. Plays super smoothly on Firefox with NoScript, uBlock Origin and many other privacy extensions. But it lacks a player tutorial IMHO.
When you finish the game you get the credits for who created it.
There's also a threejs reference in a hard to reach area.
Absolutely masterful. Setting the standard for web based games. Congratulations!
. Loved it. The art was refreshing and interactions so fluid.
Was having fun. Completed all but the scientist objective as I couldn't find the last person. I found what looked to be a hidden location and as the person there said "Hello" it crashed the page. oof.
Happy to find out it remembered my progress. And I found the final delivery and completed the game. And yes, I'm sure the girl on the roof is a 'hidden' thing. She talks about three.js, game development, and art.
Beautiful design, but uncontrollable and unplayable. Edit: on a phone I'm constantly bumping into walls.
What? On desktop? Found it extremely easy to control...
I got Hayao Miyazaki vibes about this game. Arigatou.
The boss reading the letter even looks like the guy.
Me too:)
Damn I'd love to play a Zelda game with that level of NPC detail and style.
You can, that game is Wind Waker
Besides the visual style being very similar, there's an island in the game with about the same amount of NPCs, and they all have their own lives and many give you chores like this one.
has a lot of potential
feedback after 5m
* there should be a help section, all i could figure out is how to walk with up/left/down/right, and w/a/s/d. And the mouse. * I got nauseous after a bit, not sure if that is everyone or just me but I did have some bad nausea on a ride (teacups) at the local carnival/fair a few months ago, and it comes back every now and then. * the controls on desktop seem too sensitive. I had to eventually walk with W and then go left and right with the arrow keys, but even then it was too sensitive
I left after 5m because of the nausea.
I liked the music and peacefulness.
I also got nausea from this game and I've never gotten nausea from a video game before. The style is amazing, but the camera controls need some work. I don't know what the camera needs besides a more standard mouse control.
same. sensitivity of the camera is just too high. it handles ok but so much sensitivity creates this motion sickness. had to quit after 30 seconds and I still can’t recover. but beautiful game though!
Yeah, I also got motion sickness from the camera! I managed to complete as I really liked everything else but I'm still a bit nauseated.
camera control is non existant, you just go and game chooses what you see. let me control the camera please
Very fun! And multiplayer too! Had some fun spamming emojis at other people :)
Idea for letting the player move the camera alone: Top 1/3 portion of the screen is for camera movement alone, bottom 2/3 keep as is for player movement
this is the most cute, beautiful shit i've seen all year. i love the fact that there are other players everywhere, since it's so convenient to dive into it via browser.
Oh my god. This is amazing.
Decentraleyes extension on Firefox results in garbled text. Not sure why this happens. It is supposed to serve some common assets locally instead of requesting them over the network.
I feel like a thief playing this for free. This is leagues better than most mobile "games", and actually online too!
Amazing.
Its got a Zelda Wind Walker vibe that I love. It was fun just running around exploring.
This should have been a steam game. I played worse games there !
It still can be. This is a really good use case for electron. Steam doesn't care what kind of program it's launching.
Love the design and concept of a tiny planet - reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy in that way. Definitely needs a tutorial or a short “How to Play” dialog or page.
On the other hand, I'm so glad it didn't. I enjoyed a few minutes of exploration before realizing what I was meant to be doing.
Second this. Pretty much standard/intuitive controls, it was fun discovering what the game was about while captivated by the beautiful music and graphics.
Stuck at loading screen for a few minutes. Hugged by HN?
not likely to be your problem, but if you are using firefox resist fingerprinting, you need to whitelist most webgl apps that use large textures, since resist fingerprinting forces a standard texture size that is a bit on the small side. or maybe your machine is really old and you're hitting same problem for real. the game doesn't really detect errors.
Beautiful. I got stuck in the corner behind Steve and game over - couldn't figure out how to navigate out, just kept triggering his dialog.
There's lots of spots where you can get stuck. Really needs a "reset position" option.
Yeah, I had to end the game due to getting stuck between the fencing on the sea side and the chemical plant columns.
Oh, this is beautiful. I did a bit of WebGL and I wonder how they achieved fluidity like this.
This is just wonderful
Wow this looks amazing, but the camera made me very nauseous, I had to stop playing.
Is this multiplayer? There are a lot of delivery people walking and jumping erratically.
I'm not sure if they are real people. I started two sessions and I didn't see my other self, despite being in the same location. Also, both times, the starting place was the same. If that would be the case for everyone, there would be many people there who just start the game.
There's probably a bunch of different rooms/shards/servers and you get randomly allocated to one when starting
Completed the game, really awesome!!
––from San Francisco
I've played it through, very relaxing and esthetically pleasing
This is fantastic.
If I may ask, how did you do the environment models? Did you use textures and UV mapping? or just untextured models with a shader for the contours?
Neat. Mini map would be cool.
Lots of fun! Just the right amount of gameplay.
Kind of curious about the physics of this; the planet would obviously have to be ridiculously dense, but just how dense?
Oh man I love "tiny planets" and anything based on them!
The spherical game environment works really well, would be great if it expand as you play more
Absolutely stunning. Well done.
I know most comments are just saying wow - but wow indeed. Felt like a kid on Newgrounds once more. Blown away
mind blown.
Can I ask the author if AI helped him with this? Is it multiplayer too?
I ask as I have been deving a webgl game for a few years
obligatory list of similar stuff.
- alba: a wildlife adventure. more gameplay but somewhat similar controls/feel
- a short hike. isometric but similar feel (thanks thrance)
- the legend of zelda: the wind waker. haven't played, but mentioned in a few other comments
- proteus. first person and more subtle gameplay
anything else?
If we're going off vibes alone, I believe "A Short Hike" would be closer.
yes, thanks! i was unsure whether to include it because it looks quite different. but you are right, it has the similar exploratory vibe and is a great game.
This is beautiful. Congrats.
great effort, consistent styling, nice gameplay!
huge success as side project and for the CV!
So Impressive
i can't find the mountain temple :(
Me either XD I keep finding new places I haven't explored yet and getting distracted.
Neither can I. I feel stupid
Programming is magic
haha this is cool
immediately hit a bug where i had like 3 character skins at once though
What a delightful little game!
Just chiming in with more positivity: was pleasantly surprised how fast this loaded and ran on mobile. Impressive work.
Nice one
Is it truely a tiny planet or just shader effects?
Probably shaders. The curvature's too extreme, and the way shadows move as you get close to them doesn't match physical reality.
Meh, that’s too bad, would have been awesome to see a planetoid engine.
well done!!
Smooth, I enjoyed it a lot.
This is amazing. Impressive.
Beautiful piece of art
Some really beautiful style and graphics. Never mind delivery I was just admiring the style.
very well done
Beautiful!
I'm proud i found the UFO lmao
I haven't found any UFOs but I did find an alien
His ship is the opposite side of the water. It's a bit tricky to find :D