Entropy - A Psychedelic Walk Through the Woods
polycounter lvl 17
Yo Polycounters!
I'm happy to share with you a short game I've been working on based on a psychedelic walk through the woods. I was inspired by a moment, awhile back, where I was walking through a beautiful forest while tripping on acid.
I remember looking around and feeling like I was on another planet - everything was vibrant and pulsing with life. I could feel how the trees, plants, water, and wind were all interconnected and came together like a crazy orchestrated symphony. And then I started freaking out cuz the acid was really strong.
Anyways, I've been having fun working on this. I plan to make a few more moments to experience, but I want it to be a short, experimental game - a poem rather than a story. Feel free to ask any questions and follow along! Thanks!
I'm happy to share with you a short game I've been working on based on a psychedelic walk through the woods. I was inspired by a moment, awhile back, where I was walking through a beautiful forest while tripping on acid.
I remember looking around and feeling like I was on another planet - everything was vibrant and pulsing with life. I could feel how the trees, plants, water, and wind were all interconnected and came together like a crazy orchestrated symphony. And then I started freaking out cuz the acid was really strong.
Anyways, I've been having fun working on this. I plan to make a few more moments to experience, but I want it to be a short, experimental game - a poem rather than a story. Feel free to ask any questions and follow along! Thanks!
Replies
needs a tiny gnome here and there!! maybe he wasn't present in what inspired this though
never saw anybody smokin acid
very inspiring work! :poly121:
@fearian - I would love to get some oculus support in here. I definitely plan to look into it once things are more finished.
@thousand - haha, you're right, I wasn't smoking anything!
What are you making it with? How do you get that pulsing effect? What's the gameplay?
Loving it so far.
It's great to see somebody do interesting stuff with shaders outside the standard-issue PBR-everything
It would be cool if the patterns on the sky-whale had a similar emissive/scrolling thing going on as the psychedelic trees.
The rocks looking like speakers is very nice.
Thanks for the questions! I'm using Unity - it's been really easy to use, and the plugins and resources from the asset store have been really helpful. I've been using things like Playmaker to get the interactive functionality in place.
The pulsing effect is a custom shader I made using Shader Forge. That's been a great help in achieving the effect I was going for. It's basically a vertex offset shader combined with scrolling UVs. I hobbled it together using some of the example shaders included with Shader Forge.
The gameplay features a large audio/musical component that's not apparent through the gifs, but the idea is that as you walk through this forest, all the elements respond to your presence both visually and musically. So, the trees, rocks, plants all come to life as you walk past them. I'm still exploring with the music - it's really hard to keep things musical without it falling apart rhythmically, so I'm also experimenting with just letting it be ambient sounds.
There will be more key moments, like the whale dragon, but I'm trying to build a mainly explorative experience, where you walk around and discover this little world. I really want it to be a reactive environment, full of mystery and discovery. It really is meant to be a walk through the woods. There is no main challenge or task to accomplish. It's exploration and discovery for the sake of it.
Thank you! That's a great idea - I would like the whale dragon to be a little more alive. I think you're right, adding an emissive/scrolling shader to some elements of it would really bring it to life. Thanks!
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/11/oculus-acquires-a-hand-tracking-company-and-an-augmented-reality-company/
@spitty - That's a great idea! I was playing with the Kinect to make music based on body movements awhile back, this would be a great evolution of that. Oculus and magic music hands would be pretty mindblowing.
Getting ready for the next moment - I want to do a circle of rocks that turn into spirit animals when you enter into the circle.
Kill Screen Feature
In the meantime, I made a little intergalacticassette tape..part of a bigger thing soon to come.
Better yet, I'd love to play a game styled like this.
Good luck! I can't wait for more.
As I worked on a folk-tale forest game some time ago, but dropped it, I've got some references that could be useful for you: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bqhvhh16nmjwiim/AADd4pQk2Qw9Xd827OiCn37Sa?dl=0
also 1 http://www.themolassesflood.com/the-flame-in-the-flood/ , 2 http://simogo.com/work/year-walk-ios/ but you probably know them already
@Avvi - Great! Thanks for all those references - I've been collecting a lot myself, but these are super helpful. I hadn't heard of The Flame in the Flood until today, so thanks for linking me up with that. Year Walk is indeed a great game - the visual style is very immersive and stylized - something I'm aiming to achieve with Entropy as well. Thanks for sending those over.
Cheers! Keep us updated!
@_Kratos_ I appreciate it! I'm hoping to have a playable release within the next month or so. I will definitely keep you guys in the loop. Thanks again!
This entropy game is fire, love it.