Gem Flask (wandering game)

Comments

Drambique's picture

rot alumi stab

Feels like spelunking. It took me a bit to figure out how the lighting mechanism was supposed to work and why it was so dark, but realizing it was really cool!

This was really cool! After

This was really cool! After realizing I was in a tall structure instead of a flat maze, I tried to make it to the roof, but I kept falling at a certain point so I gave up. I met a deer though!

sergiocornaga's picture

Very nice, I hope this is

Very nice, I hope this is the first of many "wandering games". Are there a lot of animals to find?

clyde's picture

Just the deer but I'm

Just the deer but I'm planning on putting an animal to find in future games since I bought the pack of them.
And for the record, I think the roof is inaccessible; this was an accident.

quasiotter's picture

do i have to talk you into it

um, this is very reminscent of NaissanceE, which is one of my favourite games of all time. makes me feel insignificant (which isn't a bad thing). seems like a great thing to have done for the time constraint.

penguin's picture

something in the combination

something in the combination of narrow passages, monotonous colours and the bareness of the incessant footstep sounds made me feel uncomfortable. the nauseating way the texture on the ground outside seemed to shrink and expand with every step i took also aroused an unreasonable feeling of irritation.
i was viscerally reminded of a occasional experience in my childhood where i would be playing ocarina of time or halo and suddenly find myself lost in an area i'd already been, filled with dead enemies or completed puzzles, then spend an hour or an afternoon hopelessly trying to reorient myself, running again and again through the same lonely spaces with growing frustration. something like being in a theatre after the show, or in the suburbs after midnight.

when the sun came up i felt a sense of relief, and stopped playing. good game :)

mkapolk's picture

wow! so mysterious. I

wow! so mysterious. I enjoyed exploring the space, and especially looking at the space from the outside to see that there are other areas to get to that I might find by going in. I didn't find any entrances to the spaces above. I thought maybe there weren't any but I see you have some animal model packs in there that I didn't see in the level, so I probably missed something.

The snapping mechanic took some time to decipher too, which was a pleasant experience. At first I did some snapping without knowing that I did, so I thought the snaps were coming from another entity, so that process of discovering they were me all along was interestingly lonely. The aesthetics of it fit really well with the mood of the piece too.

I started reading "A Timeless Way Of Building" (because adamatomic tweeted about it the other day) and in it he talks about a building being "alive" if its design is in concert with the patterns of life that people typically do there. It made me wonder what kind of activities are typical in this space. It feels somehow fit for wandering and snapping.

the prospect of using voxel tools really appeals to me, but I haven't tried them yet 'cause it feels like they give a very distinct quality to the spaces they create. it's not a bad quality I just haven't needed that in a game yet, and it seems like it'd be hard to subvert it to make the voxel form serve another aesthetic need. In the way, say, a csg tool could be made to fit any number of different styles.

everythingstaken's picture

Nice

Haha, when I was playing this, I was thinking this reminded me of some of your (mkapolk) stuff.

I had a nice time playing this. There was a cool amount of discovery in this. I like that this is somewhere between a gallery game or walking sim and a platformer like Getting Over It or something. There were some points where I would not make a jump and fall a specific amount and have to restart and such. It was also interesting trying to parse through the space. All of the colors and the shading and the lack of lighting in some places made discovering different areas very surprising.

pensive-mosquitoes