Deliver Us, Brother by oter
Your maker has not returned from the island of Lithon. Lead your fellow factotums to freedom by sailing across the Lapidarean Channel from Rodnokos to Phiatho.
Deliver Us, Brother is a combination stealth-lite game and text based narrative adventure, where your choices matter and you can either succeed or fail to deliver your precious cargo. Talk your way past the sentries and onto the island of Phiatho, or slip past and avoid them altogether - just mind the rocks, they'll sink your ship.
I highly recommend you play through Unity Play or itch, as the embed is iffy.
Controls: W - Move, A/S - Rotate (only while moving), Esc for the pause menu.
The game is best played in full screen accessed by the WebGL player or by scrolling to the bottom right of the embed.
When not in full screen mode, you can exit the game via the white X in the top right corner of the screen (Unity only).
Audio: I added low ambient ocean sounds (essentially white noise), which can be muted/unmuted through the Unity WebGL player. The audio is not my own, it is Oregon Coast Ocean by deadrobotmusic, downloaded from freesound. I did minor editing to remove a noisy section in Waveform.
Font: GarineldoSC, an OFL font created by gluk and downloaded from fontspace. Several of gluk’s fonts are also very good, and this one is exactly what I envisioned for this game. I recommend checking them out.
Basecode Notes: The dialogue and subtle reputation system featured in this game is something I coded from scratch (without following guides etc) over the course of the last month as I practiced and prepared to participate in LD53. All of the dialogue was written in Excel for csv formatting (and was written during the jam of course). I use the new Unity Input System, and arranged my Input Controller script based on a tutorial by the Youtube channel NowWeWake, someone who isn’t a Youtuber but posted a handful of very good Unity tutorials during lockdown. Spotlight detection by sentries is based directly from a coding tutorial by Youtuber Sebastian Lague. Only that method is copied and then adapted from his Stealth Minigame Tutorial.
I didn't use any AI or other assets besides those mentioned above to make this game. It was quite a learning experience!
If you find any bugs :frowning: comment and let me know and I'll fix them and post the changelog here.
Please also comment with your thoughts and feedback! I only started learning game dev and coding in January, so I'm here to learn as much as I can, alongside making and playing games :smiley:
| Deliver Us, Brother on Unity Play | https://play.unity.com/mg/other/deliver-us-brother |
| Deliver Us, Brother on Itch | https://otergen.itch.io/deliver-us-brother |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/deliver-us-brother |
Ratings
| Overall | 1114th | 2.917⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1203th | 2.333⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 807th | 3.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 810th | 3.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 747th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 973th | 2.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 669th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 29🗳️ | 34🗨️ |
The horizontal movement at least in this mac were very laggy, but managed to get some of the story through. I like the slow burn, but the text could run a bit faster.
I'm in two minds about the fixed viewpoint. On one hand, fixing the camera so it only looks straight ahead amps up the tension -- I kept wondering if something was going to jump out at me from the sides. But on the other hand, I want to be able to look around as I travelled.
This is a great effort. Well done on your first LD jam game!
Well done for your first creation!
@rose I’m glad you like faces in my pen sketch to vector art style. I’m not much of an artist, but for 2d that’s what I’m most comfortable in.
@the-neon-shark @coatline I agree about the boat and given more time I’d definitely add some sort of health system so you could hit a few rocks before going down (and probably a repair/upgrade system with it).
For the audio, I wanted the sound of water lapping against rocks and a boat, probably similar to what you’re thinking. Too many of the tracks I checked out were simple “waves on sandy beach” type recordings so this was the best I could come up with. Audio was a stretch goal anyway and only added in the last hour or so.
@digital-bacon was wondering if anyone would bring up the viewpoint/camera. I originally wanted to make a first person perspective and just have the boat be something you interact with to move. I scrapped that and tried for a couple hours to make a follow cam where you can still look around, as you describe, but I’d never made a third person camera before, much less one like that, so in the end I had to settle for a fixed perspective. The camera was meant to follow the boat and keep the whole thing in frame, but at some point it ended up over the bow and I gave up trying to fiddle with it.
@Agrimes Thanks for the comment, I was wondering if anyone had seen that ending.
If you decide to add more features after the jam, it would be cool to have a system where you can choose to move faster but the splashing would alert sentries at a longer distance. It could also be a lot of fun to manage your boat's inventory and keep a certain amount of cargo earmarked for bribes when you do inevitably get caught. All in all, this is an impressive entry for being so new to coding, and you should be very proud of your hard work!