Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → The Glasses Shop
By sudocoffee
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 85 | 3.50 | 27 | |
| Fun | 103 | 3.34 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 45 | 3.78 | 27 | |
| Theme | 131 | 3.40 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 156 | 3.02 | 27 | |
| Audio | 135 | 2.88 | 27 | |
| Humor | 2.50 | 3 | ||
| Mood | 81 | 3.48 | 27 |
Im using windows and for some reasons it just stuck on the status of beginning page. I turned it off using the Task Manager.
I wonder if you have any idea about this(since Im not a lua programmer), or it really takes an looooog time to load?
@akuta -- Hey! By status page do you mean this pic?
titlescreen.png
You should be able to start the game by pressing space, enter, escape, or left-click. I meant it to be a kind of title screen, but I should have made that clearer (I forgot that loading screens exist ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯).
@sudocoffee yes that's the pic, but it's not a problem with the explanation, it didn't respond at the **very** beginning.
I have checked the codes again, it must be a game with good modeling I think, which is something I haven't seen through the day.
For me, it just captures the full screen and doesnot respond to anything, without even a error pop-up or something else. Does the game requires extra environments or packs to run?
@akuta-zehy -- Game works for me on Linux and Windows 10, but just tried on Windows 11 and it's broken there (same thing you mentioned). Looks like the following two config lines are responsible (in [conf.lua](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld58/blob/1c0da2a321333c81a7f62b606a90f6fae7755ebf/main/conf.lua)):
``` t.window.width = 0 t.window.height = 0 ```
It works if I remove those lines, however, then the game renders at the default height/width of 800x800. I'll have to do some digging to see if I can find a workaround. Thanks for catching!
I made it! I got all the orbs! I'm not sure if I got it all figured out in the end, but it seemed like you do reset to the top if you're not holding any orbs while falling? I used that to get the cyan orb, and then finally made my way to green! Very atmospheric game! I liked how the transparency effect on the geometry gave it an otherworldly appearance, I think that looked cool, especially the ending. Very fun trying to get the puzzle figured out, I loved when it all connected. I kind of just decided for myself that falling down is a game over, so recognizing that that initial assumption was wrong, and I had basically tricked myself into being unable to progress, felt really smart once I figured that out, I liked that! Very cool game, great job!
Woah! What a fascinating and trippy game - the non-z-culling was actually a really unique effect, and the corale-like sfx makes this a very cool, aetherial, psychedelic experience. I was able to get all orbs (took me so long to realize I could hold more than 1! I was throwing them forward and chasing after, haha) Really cool entry, never seen an effect like it
I enjoyed your game last jam so much, I had to check out this one! I'm glad I did. It was strange and unsettling, but in a fascinating way. I was captivated by the mood and the feeling it evoked. It very much felt like a dream, with the extreme perspective and the unique logic that started to make sense after a while.
I managed to get to the ending! The game was a really cool experience, well done!
Just a note -- was a bit MIA last week, but I've got time this week to review games / reply to comments if you've got any questions.
I finally have a fix for Windows 11 (see v1.1 in the downloads). For some reason, the game only freezes if the game resolution is exactly the same as the screen resolution. I ended up adding [SDL3](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/FrontPage) as a dependency just to find the screen resolution, so I could set the game resolution to 1 pixel wider than the screen.
Seems to work now, but let me know (anyone) if the bug shows up again.
Hey @captaindreamcast -- Thanks so much for playing!! You always reset to the top after a few seconds, the only exception is after you get the final orb. It's kind of my favorite kind of experience, just getting thrown into something weird and unusual where you have to figure out the rules as you go.
@ugly-robot -- Glad you enjoyed it. The effect is just to render each group of objects onto its own canvas, and then overlay the canvases on top of eachother. It definitely messes with your sense of perspective though!
Hey @vidarn -- Thanks for stopping by! Interesting experience is pretty much my favorite genre ╮(￣_￣)╭. Wasn't sure how many people would actually find the ending, but seems like everyone that's tried found it eventually.
Hi, played your game. Concept is interesting and calm, kind of puzzle game feeling, where you can just relax and follow the path, looking for interesting things.
Have a question regarding gameplay, though. Put a spoiler tag, just to keep people's first impression intact.
!> Is this expected that by pressing space character throws last collected item? It's not in controls. !> It could ruin the game, because you no longer see the changes applied by that item and can fall infinitely. !> And my gamer's instincts wanted me to jump on some platform sections, so I pressed it a few times and fell)
@energon -- Hi! Left click and space actually do the same thing (just added that to my controls).
Originally I had reasons you'd want to throw your "glasses", and I just didn't get to that part before the deadline. It's definitely too easy to lose your glasses that way though (it's always possible to get them back, just difficult).
Interesting concept, however, even if you can just get the basics done, it would be good to include some affordance to guide the player into the realm and set an expectation on what to do and what the goal is for the game. If you can get the gameplay solid, the graphics and sound can be forgiven.
Nicely done! The mood and the visuals are very interesting
@blazerker -- Hey, thanks for the feedback! It's good feedback, and I think there's an important balance to be had between making the game accessible to different audiences, while also not making players feel like they're being spoon fed the gameplay.
For this game in particular though, I will disagree and say the game would have been worse off if it explicitly told the player what the goal is. That's just the kind of experience I was going for this jam. Think old-school adventure games like Myst, where you're thrown into the game with no instruction and spend most of the game figuring out what your goals are.
I love the conceptual adventure, I would love to delve up to the end but having to restart everything when I fall felt like too much the 3rd time :-( A checkpoint at every "box collected" would have made me continue. I still may get back to it cause I loved the atmosphere
A very mysterious experience. I really liked the experience of unlocking vision of the level as you collect items. Also having to fall off the world to get one of the cubes was a neat touch. I feel like having objects be visible through each other could lead to some cool puzzles in further development of this idea. The ending was neat too, suddenly the world actually shifts on picking one up :D
@sevansevan -- Thanks for playing! You can actually recover from any game state without restarting, but I could have made that more clear (and some states are harder to recover from than they should be). A small hint below if you need one:
!> Falling isn't the end of the game, if you wait for a moment after falling.
@alex-mulkerrin -- Glad you liked it! I could definitely see puzzles being made around the overlapping objects effect.
Originally, I planned to give each sphere it's own unique camera effect, to the point where having too many camera effects would have made it basically impossible to navigate (which is where the throwing mechanic would have been useful). But I only had time for the one effect, so it just became an interesting visual thing, rather a mechanical thing.
(accidental post)
__φ(。。)
!> Is the game over when you collect the green cube? Seems to be the only cube with a different effect, deletes everything physically as far as I can tell with nothing left to do?
This was rather confusing but I think I eventually managed to figure the mechanics out - certainly an interesting approach to the "rule-learning" puzzle genre where you have to learn the basic rules to the world itself. The graphics were a bit glitchy (in particular, the pause menu liked to violently shake triangles on the screen) but otherwise did a great job of conveying a mysterious mood, especially combined with the falling down sound.
The game felt incomplete but otherwise was a cool experience, good work!
@bad-fetus -- Thanks! Yeah, the menu glitching is partly why I added the epilepsy note. No idea why it does that, except that the menu gets rendered in 3D space, and the triangles are drawn from coordinates (pass:polygon in [this file](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld58/blob/main/main/main.lua)).
!> Yep, that's the end! I enjoy the challenge of making games without any words (I've done that for the last three Ludum Dares), but it does make it tricky to communicate when the game is over. Giving the player a win/gameover screen is the most obvious, but also the least interesting, so I like to experiment with alternatives.
!> Collecting the last cube doesn't even end the game, technically. You can still throw your cubes away and the geometry will go back to normal (if you can find it).
Not a bad attempt! Gave me DND vibes when unlocking parts when you explore them haha nice job! :D
I am really impressed with your project. At first it was a bit difficult to understand what was going on, but once I grasped the concept, I started having a lot of fun. I see you didn't figure out how to fix z-fighting on some models and (at least on linux) I experienced jittery mouse movement. Also, the window was really fighting my desktop environment (hyprland)
Very interesting visual mechanic, though I also didn't really understand it at first.
At least as a textless game it won't ever have font/localization/texture issues :D
Neat idea. Is there supposed to be no depth testing? It was quite odd with some of the more distant geometry being rendered over the closer stuff. I played the Linux version. I had to restart several times as I kept trying to jump and accidentally throwing my cubes into the precipice. It would be cool if there was a reason to drop them, though as is that ability is a hazard. I assume the green cube was supposed to be the ending. That could be made more clear.
@dock-frankenstein -- Thank you so much! Figuring out what's going on is kind of the main puzzle of the game, so it's nice to hear when people enjoy that about it.
I developed the whole thing on a Linux laptop, but I was using KDE Plasma (on Wayland), so I'm not sure what the window or mouse issues are about (I didn't have those issues on my machine). But it's awesome seeing people try it out on other Linux devices!
Also (theoretically) z-fighting shouldn't be possible the way it's rendered, unless you mean the overlapping objects effect or the glitchy menu screen bug?
@someone -- Thanks for playing! Yeah, the no-depth-test effect was on purpose. It actually renders each color of geometry to a separate canvas (with depth testing enabled), and then overlays each of those canvases to the screen in a specific order.
Originally each cube was going to have its own (usually disorienting) visual effect, and while holding cubes would be necessary to progress, the more cubes you had the more disorienting it would be to navigate, and so you'd need to balance what orbs you were holding at any one time. Of course, I never got that far, so the only real effect I have in the game is the depth test.
Yep, the green cube is the ending! Didn't necessarily want to fade to an end screen, but the ending was added at the last minute and could have been made a bit more clear.
Very interesting game with some spooky/ethereal vibes. I enjoyed the strange rendering that made you feel sort of out of place. After a few times of falling it was no longer putting me back in the world so I wasn't able to finish but I really enjoyed the concept. Nice work
@bentglasstube -- Thanks for playing! A note about falling in spoilers:
!> If you reached the last green sphere, that's the end of the game, and it disables the looping mechanic. But there is a bug where if you reset the game after winning, the loop will still be disabled and you'll fall forever. Could be you ran into that bug?
Really cool visual effects! I'm excited to see more gameplay possibilities in the future.
Can't fairly vote. It behaves weird on startup (the window shows up in Task Manager, but I have to Alt-Tab out and in again to get display). I'm then in a room with orbs, can look around, but WASD don't do anything; neither does clicking or space. That sounds like not intended or I'm missing something crucial.
@endurion -- Nope, that doesn't sound right! I don't know how to reproduce though, as I haven't seen that issue on any computer I've tested it on. It might be an engine related bug (I've had a lot of issues with the framework I used this jam).
Very cool mechanic, reminds me of Cocoon!