Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Souvenir prototype (build 08) is public!

You can play an early version (and by early, I mean still really unpolished, buggy, and unfinished) of our collaborative thesis at Parsons: "Souvenir." It's basically VVVVVV + Proteus + Dear Esther + a bit of Portal. For some of the thinking behind the design, read "Against Puzzles?"

Here are some bugs / glitches / issues we already know about:

- Walking forward sometimes veers you to the left or right.
- Movement feels like you're wearing boots made out of peanut butter, but like really bad processed gummy peanut butter with lots of corn syrup and guar gum in it.
- Jumping can seem inaccurate at times.
- Sometimes you fly off into space. (First person 6 DOF movement is HARD.)
- Respawning sometimes glitches out / throws you into an infinite loop of falling. (Or maybe it's a metaphor! Ooooh!)
- There is no ending implemented yet; it's supposed to kick-in after you collect X number of souvenirs. As of now, you just keep collecting them and distorting the HUD.
- Crows freak out a lot and rotate improperly.
- Narrative is incomplete. Think of it as an incentive to try it again in a few months!
- 360 controller support for Windows got broken in our rush to get 360 controller support working for OSX (our gallery kiosk uses a Mac) but in the future it'll be seamless and lovely

What I'd love to know (leave a comment here or tweet at me or whatever):
- If the framerate was unacceptable, what are your system specs?
- Roughly, how long you played and why; when did you stop and why?