python-b5 2021-10-04 22:34
This is really impressive! Wish I had a real oscilloscope to play it on :)
Not sure how it fits the theme, but this is quite fun!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Fractured Edge
By samuli, leokrechmer and Petteri
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 58 | 4.20 | 62 | |
| Fun | 87 | 4.09 | 62 | |
| Innovation | 1 | 4.65 | 65 | |
| Theme | 611 | 3.67 | 62 | |
| Graphics | 166 | 4.32 | 63 | |
| Audio | 140 | 3.98 | 63 | |
| Humor | 760 | 2.88 | 53 | |
| Mood | 120 | 4.10 | 58 |
This is really impressive! Wish I had a real oscilloscope to play it on :)
Not sure how it fits the theme, but this is quite fun!
@python-b5 The rendering gets more unstable the more damaged you are. Also the oscilloscope itself is extremely unstable on itself. :D
Really original idea and i like the graphics
Hey, where can I find the oscilloscope emulator? I could hear the game but couldn't see anything :(
@gabriel-naves-da-silva When you open the game you should see a menu where you select to play with an emulator or with an oscilloscope. When selecting the emulator an another window will open for rendering. It should look like the one in the 3rd screenshot here. Two windows, one for controlling the game and one for rendering.
I think I had the same issue, no emulator window showed up for me
@samuli Second Window does not open on my PC (Win10). I can't play the game.
ISSUE BELOW SOLVED DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.1.
The emulator dll was built as debug so it didn't work if you didn't have Visual Studio installed. I rebuilt it as release and it works now without any extra things needed to be installed.
___ @legolula @leorid Thats no good. :( I'll contact the guy who made the emulator. It was not made by us during the jam. Your PC is most likely missing a certain .net Framework Runtime / C++ redistributable or something else that comes with our development environment.
EDIT: Also check your anti virus. It may prevent the game from opening other processes.
EDIT2: And if all fails. You can press U to view debug rendering in the build. That works without the emulator too.
Very special idea an well implemented. The graphics have a very nice vibe
This is just glorious... The movement feels really good too and the framerate is unironically the smoothest of any game ive played in a long time haha... The control scheme was good, but the image to explain it was really way more painful to figure out than it should have been (also, what about colorblind people?) And i guess the emulator being a minuscule hole that you cant *really* resize is a bummer Overall, i was expecting to be impressed, *and still got impressed .*
The bassline's synth sounding like oscilloscope music sounds is the cherry on top
Ping! @gabriel-naves-da-silva @legolula @leorid The emulator is now fixed. You can download a new corrected version. Sorry for the confusion.
@voodinator Thanks!
@mrchip Thanks for the praise! Originally the controls were only in readme.txt so I just slapped something in the last moments. Glad that you figured them out. :D
Cool I'll give it another go!
@mrchip I'm glad the game ran smoothly for you! There was quite a bit of math involved in turning all the 3d models into vectors for the oscilloscope and then clipping them all against the round frustrum and each other so that lines don't show up through what should be solid surfaces. It's not lightweight to do all that on CPU (initial version with all the graphics effects ran at single-digit framerates) and it was only ~2 hours before the deadline that I managed to get it all optimized enough to run smoothly. Thanks again for the feedback!
I'm amazed with what some people come up with here. Not only is it a smooth running game which reminds me of Descent but also done on an unconventional piece of hardware. Well done to the whole team.
Note: I used the emulator as I don't own an oscilloscope but still amazed.
Now this is something special. The graphics combined with the shaky movement and rotational freedom create such a unique experience that I haven't seen anywhere else. Music is great, everything fits the theme perfectly, only thing I'll pick on is the gameplay feel isn't the greatest. Just a fantastic game with great potential!
Nice! I didn't expect it to be like a full 3d metroidvania-type thing. Bonus points for being (I assume) the only oscilloscope game in this jam.
Unfortunately the emulator window wouldn't open for me even in the supposedly fixed build, so I had to play with the debug view, which massively compromises the experience. For that reason, I have judged the game's graphics and feel from your little video on an actual oscilloscope - it looks fantastic, really. The music and audio also really feel in line with the gameplay. Excellent work on making a unique concept work out so well! (I just wish I could've played proper...)
Very interesting and unique idea. It would be nice to play this on a real oscilloscope. It was a little bit hard to keep track of where I am though.
Wow, what an interesting way to make a game. It's quite impressive what you got there. Sometimes the dual window setup with the emulator was a bit weird but I guess there wasn't any other way around it. Overall nice game! It's really smooth and I like the audio as well
Wow! How does one even make a game on an oscilloscope in this day and age??? It's absolutely brilliant, I love vector-based games (I mean look at my username) and Metroid (I mean look at my profile picture), and this is the closest thing to Metroid Prime on the Vectrex! One thing I'd improve though (and I don't know if it could even be done) - The game is quite disorienting, especially when you get hit (though I dig the effect). Maybe playing it on a real scope would solve this issue though. Either way, best game I've played in this Ludum Dare so far. Bravo!
Oh my god, this is so stupid and gimmicky, I absolutely love this
And the game is really fun as well
And the soundtrack is really good
Bruh. This might be the coolest LD game I've ever seen.
@chaosbrick Sad to hear that. So far the fix I made has worked with all the PC configurations I have tried so I can't really think of any way fixing it when I can't reproduce it myself. Great that you were able to make some sense out of the debug view at least. :)
@preda Yea the second screen had to be there to catch controls and play PC audio as the oscilloscope and the emulator only do drawing. I added extra info there as its better than just having a black window. Fun fact: the oscilloscope in our setup was also an audio device so we used Windows communications audio device to draw the game on the scope and normal Windows audio device with Unity to play game sounds.
@vectrex28 I have made a couple of Vectrex games too. Awesome console. This was a logical next step!
@totteri Bruh. You are the coolest ever for saying that. Thanks!
Really interesting game! I liked the music a lot, reminded me of Perfect Dark on N64, it used to be my favorite FPS game. The wobbly line effect was also cool when you got hit!
@noke hey! Thanks! Well, I've been thinking of some old school games like Duke Nukem, Doom, first Quake etc, but tried to stick with Sega chip sounds and instruments, like Ninja Tirtles, Sonic, Comix Zone. I'm glad you did like it! Thanks!
After I had tried change width of elumator it was freezed. And any controls didn't work. But I like this style :)
it reminded me of system shock!) Good job)
Really creative idea. It really feels like a classic arcade game, and the music was spot-on.
I'm gonna repeat what others have said but again, very impressive game technically. The person who thought about rendering to an oscilloscope is genius! Too bad I don't own one. The soundtrack is also great and sends me back in time. The gameplay itself does the job and fits the retro sci-fi vibe. It's smooth and engaging, the map is not very easy to navigate visually but I somehow did not get lost or at least not for long. The only thing though is it almost gave me a headache :P. I also wish I could play it in fullscreen so I can appreciate it in its full glory. The relevance to the theme is not super obvious beside the display jamming when you take damage but overall Great work!
Interesting dynamic game. Too bad there is no oscilloscope to get the most out of the game experience. Didn't make it to the end, got stuck in one of the rooms.
Wow, talk about scope creep... *slaps thigh* One of the most interesting jam games I have ever played! Thanks for making.
Very original idea and concept ! Music is nice, and i got some feelings of old arcade game.
Cool game. I like it :)
Man, I thought I was being somewhat original building for a 30+ year old console, and you folks are out here making a solid game for a dang oscilloscope! This is definitely one of my favorites from this jam.
The controls are incredibly solid, and I really liked the unstable damage effects. The music also definitely gave me some doom vibes. (Beyond just the instruments/tools used) Thanks for a really fun entry!
I really enjoyed this game! It was alot of fun to fly around and shoot stuff. It reminds me of the game Descent, which I have always wanted to play. It was a bit hard to navigate the level due to the simple graphics, but I have great respect for making it on an oscilloscope. The shooting had a nice feeling, even though it was hard to see if you hit anything. My only problem was that the render distance was a bit to short for the big room. But all other aspects are good. Nice game!
@cppchriscpp I'll answer about sound-wise things :) I really!!!!!! wanted to make the music with tools Bobby Prince used to do while he been composing for Doom and Dume Nukem, but unfortunately, I didn't have time to manage it... may be next time :) So I used the Sega Genesis' chip processor (Yamaha YM2612), it is OF COURSE another story but, cmon, no one played games with osciloscope, I could have use any tools I wanted :) There was no... standard for that :) Thanks for review! And we are glad you did like it!
Very awesome, I wish I had an oscilloscope to play it on lol.
This was unexpectedly awesome! Thanks for posting a video of it working on an actual scope. I'm pressed.
And surprisingly, the graphics were pretty easy to intuit. Loved zooming around and spiraling with the turbo. I admittedly got a bit stuck after picking up the tractor beam. Three doors and a bunch of floating blocks, but I couldn't find the way to trigger the exit. Up until that point, I like how you guided me around by placing enemies in the nice path--that was good signaling.
Really, awesome game!! #1 innovative for sure.
That was one hell of a trip. 100% loved it, this is super original while at the same time being fun to play. Amazing entry!
@hawkin Thanks! The tractor beam tutorial in the controls screen tells you that you can destroy doors by throwing objects to them. I had to lock in the player to teach the mechanic. You are not first to wonder what to do in that room. Glad to hear that enemy placement helped. I tried to always spawn enemies along the way to the next objective and make unique looking corridors for each area connected to the hub to help guide the player. In hindsight, I should have maybe made doorways to different areas different shape too.
@eternalxp The render distance used to be even shorter before we optimized the rendering! It was a constant fight to keep it as long as possible. At some point I even cut the enemy polycount from ~80 to ~20 to make sure we can actually render further when there are bunch of enemies on screen.
@cppchriscpp Anyone doing stuff for older stuff gets my respect! Problems you face when developing things for obsolete hardware are always a fun challenge to overcome.
@abregado The amount of scope creep puns we were throwing to each other while developing the game was quite high! In the end the scope of the game didn't change much. Only things we dropped from initial plan were more complex boss fight at the end and support for skinned meshes (which we have enabled in our oscilloscope Unity plugin post jam now).
Wow so cool! I love how everything gets wobbly when you take a lot of damage. Really impressive entry! I wish I had an oscilloscope to fully appreciate the craftsmanship! Cool!
This is so cool, I wish i could get a real oscilloscope to play this game. Even on an emulator it feels really good and its really impressive
Amazing, but would love to play the game on the real thing! I was really confused about the fact that it opens a custom engine renderer and then you have to focus the game with the input, but I got it quickly! But I wonder, why not just implement emulator rendering in Unity? :D It seems like a weird workaround.
@notke We did not do the emulator. This was just the fastest way of making it also playable for others as I expected many do not have oscilloscopes sitting on their desks. Of course custom oscilloscope like shaders in Unity would have been nicer. You can actually press U to see current rendering in Unity that we translate to lines.
Descent! A rush of nostalgia knocked me off my feet! Thank you for this game!))
The fact that it's rendering to oscilloscope is pretty insane, if this does not win at least innovation, then riot!
This is :fire: avangarde tech with Descent vibes. Grats Team! & respect
Hello. I am a little bit disappointed because I would like to play, but I cannot. I have no osciloscope. So I use the emulator, but I have only another window with something which reminds me a corridor. However, controls keys don't work. I did something wrong. Let me know please. Your project seems so cool ++
@geckoo1337 When playing with the emulator you need to mouse click the 2nd window: the one where you selected use emulator. Not the emulator itself. Use wasd and mouse to move around after that. Hope this helps!
I actually tried to run it with a scope. But without much of success - I've hit the same issues I had trying to watch scope music - the image is too wavy twitchy and UNSTABLE. That's probably related to eighter stuff windows does to "improve" sound, not good enough audio card, electromagnetic interference or some other issues with my setup.
One of issues, probably not related to my setup is the image being inverted on x axis. Not sure, but maybe different osciloscopes interpret x signal polarity differently.
DSC_0108.JPG DSC_0109_.JPG
Why an oscilloscope? This is too interesting!!!
@a-bond Great looking scope you have there! If you are just using off the shelf usb audio card, the audio is most likely filtered via the card / Windows so thats why the image you see is really soft. X/Y channel flips are also scope specific so that is something that is up to you to flip. We currently do not have oscilloscope config files where you could define the characteristics of your device unfortunately.
Reason why our output is so sharp is that we are using a custom firmware on a STM32 MCU to translate the audio signal to oscilloscope. The firmware we use is made oscilloscopes in mind. You can find the solution we use here: https://github.com/tikonen/DACDriver
you people made it possible for me to play an osciloscope game! that was magical by itself.. but even without the osciloscope part this game was real complete even with homing missiles and even the enemy spawning positions to guide the player through this unfamiliar environment.... man... real professional work! thanks for making this game :thumbsup: respect.
@a-bond I'm the guy who implemented the hardware interface to the oscilloscope. It's based on STM32F4-DISCOVERY1 board. I wrote a firmware that implements an USB audio device that translates the audio with MCU's precision DAC. Firmware source code and built binary can be found here: https://github.com/tikonen/DACDriver. You can see example of setup (and a simple LunarLander game I wrote for testing) in this repository: https://github.com/tikonen/AudioRender oscope_discovery.jpg Btw, nice scope, seems to be Soviet made S1-65A from 70's. My desk scope is similiar S1-73.
Here is Fractured Edge running on a Heathkit IO-12 Vacuum Tube Oscilloscope from year 1969 (Year of the Moon landing!) fractured_edge_heathkit2.jpg fractured_edge_heathkit1.jpg
This kind of vintage scope does not follow input voltage as sharply as more modern 80's scope, hence the 'shooting stars' or 'droplets' you see on the screen. These are artifacts when particle beam accelerates and deaccelerates from vector to vector.
@mulleteer Hi! Surprizingly, I had that exact board and most difficult part of using it was to find my only mini-USB cable. Special thanks for providing compiled firmaware, looks like installing that "System Workbench for STM32" to build it from source would be too difficult for me.
> seems to be Soviet made S1-65A from 70’s
yep, that's С1-65А, not sure if it is from 70's, it's serial number makes me think that it is made in 1982
@samuli with propper DAC the game now looks much better, at least in map mode:
DSC_0115.JPG
but in the game itself, the image is still twithy, like blurred/jumping mostly along a diagonal:
DSC_0116.JPG
I suspect, that's because the game tries to play music using the same device as the one used to output graphics to osciloscope. When I connect headphones parallel to osciloscope I still can hear a little of music (which btw is nice, when played in emulator mode).
@a-bond Awesome! You're right that the music plays now on the same device as rendering. This should be easy to fix. Make sure that: A) Windows default output audio is configured to your speakers/headphones B) The DAC Driver output device as configured as the default "Communication Device". You can do this from Control Panel -> Hardware Sound -> Manage Audio Devices -> Set Default Communcation Device.
@a-bond You should set the Windows default audio for game audio and windows default communication device for the scope. We did this as we needed audio to be routed to two places and abusing the communication device role fit that well as Windows generally don't like to playback different audio to different sources. This is not well documented in our end, I should maybe update the readme file that comes with the game to tell this.
Glad to see it running so well anyways!
@mulleteer, @samuli thanks, now it works well:
DSC_0118.JPG
but inversion of x axis still adds one more degree of difficulty to six degrees of freedom :disappointed:
@a-bond Good news! I made a new build of the game with scaling support added: https://zhamul.itch.io/fractured-edge
You can use command line arguments -scaleX [float] and -scaleY [float] to scale the rendering. The default values are -2, -2, so if you wan to flip x axis. Just start game with "-scaleX 2". I also added this feature to our public Unity plugin. Give it a go if you want to do your own game for your scope! https://github.com/ptimonen/AudioRenderUnity/
Very creative!
@samuli cool! I finally could play the game through on my scope!
> our public Unity plugin. Give it a go if you want to do your own game for your scope!
but I prefer Godot 😶
This is an original, ambitious game with an incredible design! I was bluffed, I love this aesthetic and I would like to see more games in the genre! I am hooked from start to finish! Thank you very much for this project!
@a-bond So nice to see someone to actually play the game it was meant to be played, I really did not expect someone to have an oscilloscope AND the board available :D
This is beyond impressive! Amazing idea. And the music sounds so good! Excellent job!
I didn't finish the game, but I'm surprised there's an actually good shooter and not just a POC! Really well made. It was lots of fun. It was a bit hard to look at with the emulator. Nicely done!
Unique concept, very cool audio. Not very playable, but there's a future to it. Thanks for this delightful work! Me, as an audio microsoud man, is so thrilled here!
Well, this is certainly one of the most unique games of the jam. While I was forced to use the emulator, the effect of using an oscilloscope and the unique style that would come with that was not lost. I've forgotten about the charm of vector-like graphics, and the music feeling like it had come out of the 80s or 90s certainly fits in with the style. The gameplay works well enough, and I love how the lines making the environment warp and distort as your health gets lower and lower. Overall, *very* impressive entry. Amazing work!
pokkaali.gif
Thanks for all the kind comments and feedback!
:wave: Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that this is featured on the GitHub Blog's LD49 roundup: [A peek inside some of the top games from Ludum Dare 49](https://github.blog/2021-10-25-a-peek-inside-some-of-the-top-games-from-ludum-dare-49/). Thanks for building this _and_ for sharing the source code! :smiley:
[1.gif](https://github.blog/2021-10-25-a-peek-inside-some-of-the-top-games-from-ludum-dare-49)