Emberlight by Frostbeak
Darkness has descended upon our puddle, little one. But, with the lantern as your guardian, we can relight the braziers. Venture forth and reclaim our home, little ember.
Please turn off your lights and use headphones for the best experience.
W to swim forward, A and D to turn, Mouse to direct the Emberlight
Made using Unity and Blender
Itch: https://noscopegreatsword.itch.io/emberlight Checkpoints and level improvements build on Itch! Linux too! Apologies for the lack of checkpoints in the LD version. But please do not consider the updated builds for the rating.
Credits:
Design by Siddharth Menon and Vedaant Sukhtankar,
3D Modelling and Animation by Aatman Dhangar,
2D Art by Anand Merchant
Linux Build available on itch
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/emberlight |
Ratings
| Overall | 651th | 3.443⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 777th | 3.125⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 622th | 3.205⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 582th | 3.636⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 207th | 3.943⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 94🗳️ | 143🗨️ |
The game is simple but interesting, I didn't read the description before playing but found out easily what to do. It's a bit ruthless though, having a few lives before having to restart would make the game a bit less frustrating.
Obviously 72 hours is not a lot of time to fill a game with content but I think a simple "Mission accomplished" screen would have been good to have so that players aren't left wandering confused after lighting the stone
We'll be adding a separate file on itch to address the core issues, separate from the jam submission.
This was a very atmospheric entry! Very ambitious to make a lighting-based game, well done!
Sound design is everything for horrors! I would 'play' with the player with some subtle 'red-eyes' blinking when enemy is engaging, may be some random chirp sounds, water effects in the dark (especially since you have such a glorious reflections), and certainly -- sound effects for different levels of proximity with the enemy. Overall a pretty solid entry. Never assumed I would worry about a water bug so much. :sweat_smile:
Here is my playthrough:
https://youtu.be/-P0rB416ciQ
Minuses - every time I lost, the game started from the very beginning and showed me the entire slow flight of the camera. I understand that this is just a jam game, but watching the same thing every time was a little boring.
@chusmimax Thank you for saying so, the plan was to provide players with a wider beam, or higher movespeed each time they lit up a beacon, but we were worried about the game getting too easy and losing that tension of managing the striders. If we had more time we woulda tried stuff out to see what worked.