The TR community has a couple of websites hosting lots of great fan levels, I'm hoping to make this good enough to allow playing them straight from the browser at some point.
Ooof make me feel old why don't you... this isn't Doom, it's Dungeon Master! The grid system, everything moving on a metronome, inventory system etc. I agree this version is shallow but very easy to pick up.
Legend Of Grimrock is the modern remake I know, drags you into its complexities level by level. Really good game.
really cool... amazing that you can get playing immediately
controls could use some work. i'd rather move with wasd, turn around with the mouse and attack with the mouse too because it's a first-person camera...
or make A and D turn-and-move in that direction with some other input for strafing which seems less useful than turning. and in any event, attacking with something like j, k or l is probably more intuitive (to me)
I think both Unity and Godot have ways to compile to WebGL. I don't have direct experience with Godot, but in Unity this would be relatively simple to do.
If this was made with Unity it would load a lot slower and perform worse. Unity is not a good fit for web. Godot might be better, I'm not sure. PlayCanvas is an option.
Probably unity, this kind of game isn't too complicated. It's mainly making it feel good and look neat with graphics and VFX.
If you went for the pure browser way, Babylon.js would be your best bet. It has a bit of a learning curve, as you would need to implement base game features yourself but it wouldn't take too long for something like this.
For me, on Firefox Android, the game worked beautifully (it got stuck at a certain point - no movement/actions accepted anymore but the visuals and menu worked).
I got to level 12 and had purchased everything, so I felt I had nothing else to strive for.
Great variety of enemies and attacks. Loved the different weapons and how they "evolve".
If would be fun to have the frozen ward being able to nullify the fireballs, as it seemed an obvious consequence.
I think after unlocking all the base weapons, it would be fun to move up and be able to access "epic" sets (not just money locked, so you don't see them until you buy the other ones).
Also expected to have some "hidden" treasure rooms but even trying no walls broke, even with bombs.
Might be nice to have a boss fight every 5 level, often it's done by taking the base enemies and making them huge and harder. If I had a reason (like reach level X to save the princess, or reach the center of the earth or something else), I would have kept playing but after level 10 and everything unlocked, I thought maybe the game was over.
I really enjoyed the experience! The graphics were great, just the level cleared text seemed lower quality than the rest (maybe a font rendering problem?).
This is insanely good, as someone who hates mobile gaming outside of pixel dungeon this is probably the first 3d shooter game I've enjoyed playing on my phone where the control and game play felt good, the fact that it's in the browser is fantastic.
This worked in normal mobile safari but when I added it to Home Screen, and turned landscape it squeezed the gameplay into the left third of the screen.
The game overlays, however, displayed undistorted, in their correct positions.
That is very cool, played far more than I thought I would. Great job!
I always found it funny when you would leave the store it would have this fade out/shrink animation. It is the same transition I have on my desktop windows and for a moment I kept thinking it was about to crash. ;)
If this style of game is up your alley but you're looking for a more complete experience, then the Legend Of Grimrock series is what you're looking for: https://store.steampowered.com/sub/49358/
The linked game is a dungeon crawler, not a blobber. A blobber implies that you control a party that acts as a single "blob" in game space - games like Might & Magic, Wizardry, Wizards & Warriors (the 2000 game) etc. are blobbers since you control an entire party but not the individual party members (so a game like Dragon Age isn't a blobber despite controlling a party because each party member is its own individual entity in the game world).
A dungeon crawler can be a blobber but not all dungeon crawlers are blobbers: if you control a single character - like in the linked game - the game is not a blobber. Note that also not all first person games where you control a party are blobbers: for example games like the classic Gold Box games (e.g. Pool of Radiance) are not blobbers since while you have first person exploration and a party to manage, combat switches to a 3rd person isometric-ish perspective where each party member is an individual entity that is controlled separately. Though some people may say that games like Gold Box have blobber exploration and non-blobber combat.
Also FWIW (and this is something the authors of the linked site above acknowledge too), not all dungeon crawlers and blobbers use a grid-based system for movement and combat: classic examples would be Might & Magic 6 and Wizards & Warriors, both of which are blobbers (the entire party acts as a single "blob" in the game world) but use free movement.
> The linked game is a dungeon crawler, not a blobber. A blobber implies that you control a party that acts as a single "blob" in game space - games like Might & Magic, Wizardry, Wizards & Warriors (the 2000 game) etc. are blobbers
And this game is also a blobber, including by that definition. Your party happens to have one member. But the game is clearly a blobber. You can do the same thing in Wizardry, it's just a bad idea.
By your definition, though, it would appear that virtually all JRPGs are "blobbers", which seems wrong to me.
> And this game is also a blobber, including by that definition. Your party happens to have one member.
If a game does not have you control a party of multiple members it is not a blobber, there is no "it just happens to have one member". That makes as much sense as Apple claiming that a tap is a zero length swipe back in the day and it'd basically mean all games are party based (hey, Quake is a party based game because you control a party of one - and Solitaire is a party based game because you control a party of zero).
> You can do the same thing in Wizardry, it's just a bad idea.
Wizardry is a blobber because you can have multiple party members even if you decide not to. The linked game is not a blobber because you cannot have multiple party members even if you want to.
> By your definition, though, it would appear that virtually all JRPGs are "blobbers", which seems wrong to me.
Only JRPGs that treat the entire party as a single "blob". And yes, blobbers are very popular in Japan and have influenced other games made there too.
Reminded me of Grimrock too, but if you also like this I'd recommend a game called Barony. Great multiplayer RPG romp that has a lot of depth and secrets to discover. Also procedurally generated.
The mechanics is quite different here. I believe Grimrock is "I move, you move" movement mechanics, and in this, the enemies moved in real time. Subtle but completely different gameplay as a result.
This is mistaken, Grimrock is realtime. I just booted it up to confirm; I don't even see an option for a turn-based mode, which would be handy, because the game is quite challenging and without deft and constant repositioning you'll quickly become spider food. :)
For Chromium based browsers you can use getLayoutMap() instead of prompting the user and then rely on the manual fallback for Safari/Firefox/Other unsupported browsers. In either case, detecting/asking for the layout makes sense for displaying the controls graphics but you should still ultimately use the keycodes for positional keys in the actual code so someone on the misdetected or on an unlisted layout can still use the positional keys as expected.
This API doesn't know what my keyboard layout is, and there's no way it possibly could; it's in the keyboard's firmware, not software.
Better than a fallible API that didn't exist when this was made, or a way-too-limited layout choice, would be to make it work well with arrow keys and mouse (arrows already do the basic movement), or to make the 6-key instruction screen configurable.
Adding configurability is a good additional option (even outside the layout detection) but because people like different layouts not because a few HN style folks break OS detection via custom firmware. It's certainly not a reasonable cause to redesign your control scheme around the limitation either. Something of 10%+ of internet users don't use qwerty, something of 0.01% set their layout via the keyboard's firmware.
Good note on the game being released ~2015 though, the API wasn't added until ~2018.
132 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadIt uses Three.js.
As a rainy weekend hack I did a quick and dirty port of a fan decompile of the original Tomb Raider to WASM/WebGL a few weeks ago:
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/ (this uses alternative fan assets inspired by TR1)
The TR community has a couple of websites hosting lots of great fan levels, I'm hoping to make this good enough to allow playing them straight from the browser at some point.
Also, this reminded me that I hadn't played my Rogule [1]for today, so I'll go do that, too :)
[1] https://rogule.com/game.html
Worked fine, cleared five levels, bored.
Legend Of Grimrock is the modern remake I know, drags you into its complexities level by level. Really good game.
controls could use some work. i'd rather move with wasd, turn around with the mouse and attack with the mouse too because it's a first-person camera...
or make A and D turn-and-move in that direction with some other input for strafing which seems less useful than turning. and in any event, attacking with something like j, k or l is probably more intuitive (to me)
Melee knockback always a tossup, especially since freeze can be chained, goes much nicer on Windforce
Observed pacman glitch: running towards projectile can cause it to miss
If you went for the pure browser way, Babylon.js would be your best bet. It has a bit of a learning curve, as you would need to implement base game features yourself but it wouldn't take too long for something like this.
May be adding mouse control? Turning with arrow keys are kind of clunky.
Great variety of enemies and attacks. Loved the different weapons and how they "evolve".
If would be fun to have the frozen ward being able to nullify the fireballs, as it seemed an obvious consequence.
I think after unlocking all the base weapons, it would be fun to move up and be able to access "epic" sets (not just money locked, so you don't see them until you buy the other ones).
Also expected to have some "hidden" treasure rooms but even trying no walls broke, even with bombs.
Might be nice to have a boss fight every 5 level, often it's done by taking the base enemies and making them huge and harder. If I had a reason (like reach level X to save the princess, or reach the center of the earth or something else), I would have kept playing but after level 10 and everything unlocked, I thought maybe the game was over.
I really enjoyed the experience! The graphics were great, just the level cleared text seemed lower quality than the rest (maybe a font rendering problem?).
Great job!
The game overlays, however, displayed undistorted, in their correct positions.
I always found it funny when you would leave the store it would have this fade out/shrink animation. It is the same transition I have on my desktop windows and for a moment I kept thinking it was about to crash. ;)
The "About" button in the menu leads to a webpage that 404s. As another commenter has pointed out the correct URL is https://www.littleworkshop.fr/projects/keepout/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1601280/Potato_Flowers_in...
https://dungeoncrawlers.org/
Dungeon crawler is a much wider field than blobber is.
A dungeon crawler can be a blobber but not all dungeon crawlers are blobbers: if you control a single character - like in the linked game - the game is not a blobber. Note that also not all first person games where you control a party are blobbers: for example games like the classic Gold Box games (e.g. Pool of Radiance) are not blobbers since while you have first person exploration and a party to manage, combat switches to a 3rd person isometric-ish perspective where each party member is an individual entity that is controlled separately. Though some people may say that games like Gold Box have blobber exploration and non-blobber combat.
Also FWIW (and this is something the authors of the linked site above acknowledge too), not all dungeon crawlers and blobbers use a grid-based system for movement and combat: classic examples would be Might & Magic 6 and Wizards & Warriors, both of which are blobbers (the entire party acts as a single "blob" in the game world) but use free movement.
And this game is also a blobber, including by that definition. Your party happens to have one member. But the game is clearly a blobber. You can do the same thing in Wizardry, it's just a bad idea.
By your definition, though, it would appear that virtually all JRPGs are "blobbers", which seems wrong to me.
If a game does not have you control a party of multiple members it is not a blobber, there is no "it just happens to have one member". That makes as much sense as Apple claiming that a tap is a zero length swipe back in the day and it'd basically mean all games are party based (hey, Quake is a party based game because you control a party of one - and Solitaire is a party based game because you control a party of zero).
> You can do the same thing in Wizardry, it's just a bad idea.
Wizardry is a blobber because you can have multiple party members even if you decide not to. The linked game is not a blobber because you cannot have multiple party members even if you want to.
> By your definition, though, it would appear that virtually all JRPGs are "blobbers", which seems wrong to me.
Only JRPGs that treat the entire party as a single "blob". And yes, blobbers are very popular in Japan and have influenced other games made there too.
But it isn't.
> Subtle but completely different gameplay as a result.
It's difficult to identify "results" of circumstances that aren't true.
What kind of response do you think is warranted?
Better than a fallible API that didn't exist when this was made, or a way-too-limited layout choice, would be to make it work well with arrow keys and mouse (arrows already do the basic movement), or to make the 6-key instruction screen configurable.
Good note on the game being released ~2015 though, the API wasn't added until ~2018.