Parabox by Core43

[raw]
made by Core43 for LD26 (JAM)
Hi, thanks for trying out (or at least looking at) Parabox!

My first Ludum Dare has been quite successful; I hope the same is true for the rest of the participants.

Use WASD or the arrow keys along with the space bar to navigate. The rest you'll just have to figure out. ;)

For those running Windows, just run parabox.exe after extracting the .zip archive

For other operating systems, you'll need to get Blender 2.66 (or a newer version) from blender.org
Once you have Blender installed, just open run_parabox.blend after extracting the .zip archive
(If it doesn't start for some reason once Blender opens, try pressing the P key)

UPDATE:
Opening levels from the Level Select now plays background music and teleport sfx like it's supposed to
Level 20 has been adjusted slightly to fix problems people have had with perspective. The solution to the level is still the same.
Level 21 no longer has duplicate textures/materials.
Pressing Escape during any level will now return you to the menu.

Known Problems:
Some computers have crashed on the Level Select while trying to open level 24.
Some ATI graphics cards are not supported by Blender's GLSL.

Ratings

Coolness 60% 3
Overall(Jam) 3.67 75
Audio(Jam) 3.38 139
Fun(Jam) 3.52 79
Graphics(Jam) 3.70 147
Humor(Jam) 2.61 170
Innovation(Jam) 2.94 278
Mood(Jam) 3.86 30
Theme(Jam) 3.70 121

Feedback

ddionisio
30. Apr 2013 路 03:00 UTC
Mad props for using blender!

I had fun playing this game, I was intrigued to continue further. I had a bit of difficulty with the controls in the beginning though, it was a little disorienting at first.

Really nice and clean graphics. The shadows are nice to look at.

The music was pretty melancholic. I feel like the block guy has a rough life and you're helping him out...or something like that :P
Lianne Booton
30. Apr 2013 路 04:56 UTC
This is rad, I love the audio and it controls nicely. Great puzzle design too :)
馃帳 Core43
30. Apr 2013 路 04:58 UTC
@ddionisio Thanks for commenting. :)
The mood/tone of the game changed over time, but I never did get around to changing the music with it before the end. It probably should have been a little bit more lighthearted. =p
馃帳 Core43
30. Apr 2013 路 04:59 UTC
@Lianne Booton
Thanks! :)
Gungnir
30. Apr 2013 路 05:09 UTC
Very nice! Great level design. I think it would have been more visually striking without the black shadows on objects, it's so clean otherwise. Would have been nice to have a light grid texture on open floor too.
Qaterknan
30. Apr 2013 路 05:12 UTC
I really liked the graphics and the audio, and so I enjoyed playing as well. It is known concept, but I liked it anyway.
Cybearg
30. Apr 2013 路 05:17 UTC
Very enjoyable puzzle game! I loved the art style and the puzzles themselves were enjoyable, though it's more of a jumping puzzler than an actual logic puzzler, but that's fine.

The one big downside, and it is a significant one, is that it can be nearly impossible to tell which blocks are at what vertical level. I think that's just an inherent problem with this view style, though, and some effort was made to have a distinction, with vertically distant blocks being fogged out. It's still not visually intuitive for jumping, requiring a lot of restarts, but at least those restarts happen quickly. I never got frustrated.

Great job!
TehSkull
30. Apr 2013 路 05:24 UTC
The shadowing is the most annoying thing in the game. The character being the light source made the shadows very distracting. Gameplay was a slight glitchy, especially in the icy parts, but other than that, all good.
snoozbuster
30. Apr 2013 路 05:24 UTC
Great job, buddy. I love how it came out, and how, even though you only had 72 hours, there's still fragments of a storyline you could grasp through the titles. A perfect example of minimalism, in that you put no more than necessary and still made something amazing. Puzzle games are a special challenge, since puzzle design can be really difficult.
Honestly, I really liked the music. Even though the game had humor to it, it still retained a semi-serious, beautiful feel, almost as if its the story of someone going through a rough time, but still remembering the good parts.

Great job, and I hope you do well.
bowlercaptain
30. Apr 2013 路 05:28 UTC
Pretty fun. Very simple, fits the theme well, though the mechanic wasn't terribly unique. Very pretty, and the song was nice. I don't exactly know the limits and abilities of Blender's interactive mode, but I would maybe advise moving to a framework with better built-in physics handling next time, so you can spend more time on what makes the game unique. If you're already a blender modeler, you may find that it plays nicely with Unity, which is a pretty solid framework.
silentspartan72
30. Apr 2013 路 06:07 UTC
Great game, amazing that it was done in blender.
EdoMiyamoto
30. Apr 2013 路 07:15 UTC
It's good, it's fun, it's relaxing !
dalbinblue
30. Apr 2013 路 11:22 UTC
Fun game, strange ending.
kbm0
30. Apr 2013 路 12:27 UTC
Great entry, minimalistic graphic and piano music always go well together. You managed to use the game mechanics as metaphors for storytelling, that's hard to do.
AestheticGamer
30. Apr 2013 路 14:10 UTC
Very fun and somewhat enriched experience that had a good amount of content. The story felt it had more to it, the Piano track was soothing and kept the pace of the game well in thought. It had a nice graphic style and screen filter, though some weird things sometimes did happen with shadows as our character block seemed to have been a source of light. Liked some of the concepts behind levels, though I still do no understand cat. Very enjoyable.
kacperski1
30. Apr 2013 路 16:04 UTC
Really good game, but becomes boring after few levels :/
snoozbuster
30. Apr 2013 路 17:31 UTC
@AestheticGamer: What was the very first level called? =p
porglezomp
30. Apr 2013 路 18:40 UTC
It crashes when I click the play button. I'm disappointed, since it looks really fun.
ramoncb
30. Apr 2013 路 20:53 UTC
Amazing BGE game! Simple and with good level design!

the ice blocks level is pretty hard xD
馃帳 Core43
30. Apr 2013 路 22:15 UTC
@Gungnir
Thanks! In hindsight, it would have been a really good idea to add a light grid. =p

@Qaterknan
Thanks for playing! :)

@Cybearg
Thanks for the feedback; if I decide to continue working on this, I'll be sure to make sure that I take that into account for all of the levels. :)

@TehSkull
I agree, the shadows didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. Those icy parts required quite a bit of fudging to make it even remotely work, but I'm glad you gave it a shot. Thanks!

@snoozbuster
I really would have liked to have made it longer, but oh well. Thanks for the compliments!

@bowlercaptain
Thanks. Blender's game engine is pretty limited and doesn't have the best of physics, so I was seriously considering learning Unity just for this, but I didn't know how fast I'd be able to pick it up, so I just went with what I knew how to use. I'll make sure to give Unity a go before next time. :)

@silentspartan72 and EdoMiyamoto
Thanks for playing!

@dalbinblue
Yes, yes it is. =p

@kbm0
Thank you. :)

@AestheticGamer
If you read the text in the first level again, you might understand why it ends the way it does. ;)

@kacperski1
Thanks for giving it a try anyways. :)

@porglezomp
I've looked into this, but I can't seem to figure out why; dose it work if you choose level 0 in the level select?

@ramoncb
Thanks! I had a bit of trouble with the ice myself. =p
Dietrich Epp
01. May 2013 路 06:01 UTC
Nice and simple. But I cannot get used to arrow keys being used for diagonal movement, there was another game which was the same way and I had a very hard time with that one too. Maybe QWAS instead of WASD would work? I could also hear some high frequency fuzz, presumably from resampling the piano track to a different sample rate without filtering.
Julian Ceipek
01. May 2013 路 06:47 UTC
One of the best entries I've played so far. Excellent storytelling, music, graphics, and, above all, level design. I really enjoyed it, except for the "Can we still be friends?" level. That was just evil :)
Nice work!

I, too, would recommend switching to Unity for game dev while sticking to Blender for graphics. The two play together really well.
Jellycakes
01. May 2013 路 07:21 UTC
Pretty cool. Enjoyed the visual effects and I liked the gameplay, very minimalist. Nice one.
馃帳 Core43
01. May 2013 路 21:45 UTC
@Dietrich Epp
Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to look into that; the controls could definitely use some work. :)
I apologize about the audio; I had to lower the quality greatly because Blender only supports .wav files and I wanted to keep the filesize down.

@Julian Ceipek
Thanks, I'll be sure to check out Unity!

@Jellycakes
Thanks! :)
kddekadenz
02. May 2013 路 16:36 UTC
Does not work properly, maybe because I'm having Blender 2.5 installed..
EricTheCoolDude
02. May 2013 路 16:59 UTC
Hmm, I really enjoyed this at first but it started getting realy frustrating later on when I couldn't tell what the vertical position of the blocks were. I had to stop playing at the "let's take a picture" level because I was getting to angry at the game. That being said the game is very impressive for a Ludum Dare game. The graphics look very nice and polished and the music works for what it is. I'm also very impressed with the amount of mechanics and content you managed to put into the game. The jumping controls got incredibly frustrating at times, though.
Alucard J
02. May 2013 路 22:32 UTC
I really liked this, was also amazed that this is a Blender game. I found the story and the characters very endearing, perhaps the player as a light source could be used to to show the difference in some perspectives (where the platforms actually are in real space compared to the player. Thoroughly enjoyable, Well Done =]
馃帳 Core43
04. May 2013 路 00:24 UTC
@kddekadenz
Are you trying to run the .blend file? If so, I can't guarantee it will work without having Blender 2.66 or newer.

@EricTheCoolDude
You were just a couple levels from the end right there. =p
Thanks for taking the time to get as far as you did and give feedback. :)

@Alucard J
Thanks for playing and the suggestion! :)
brxtr
04. May 2013 路 04:52 UTC
I liked the menu, although it was a little glitchy. The platforming was solid, except for the irritating lack of diagonal movement and general glitchiness when moving from one surface to another. The level design was all right, but coupled with the slow movement of the player and objects in the world, levels did become a little boring.
naughtyloose
06. May 2013 路 20:40 UTC
awesome game. I loved the music. It created a certain relaxed mood.