Nobody has said it yet: It's incredibly fun to play. It's not just a good demo, it's simply a good game. The enemies are so smart. Like the nearly invisible ghost. The animations are also great. You want to do something all the time. And it looks just incredible!
I only played 3 levels (gotta work), but that's some awesome work.
Quick question: is it possible to use multitouch to have movement controls on one side and direction controls on the other? Or, is that not doable, and that's why you guys decided to put all the controls on the left?
Yes, it's probably possible to do as you suggest. However, we're already using the right portion of the screen for player actions (use weapons and potions).
It took us about 3 months to create this game as a two-person team.
Budget was actually pretty low since we only had to buy several 3D assets (they were not created specifically for our game), a few textures and some sound effects.
We used the three.js library.
Much less than that. I'd say under $1k in this case, but that doesn't mean anything because a huge part of your budget would be development cost, which was done in-house on this project.
Wow, stupid question, but why did you do that, if there's no margin? :) As a showcase to promote your other products or your company?
I'm interested in this because game developers obviously tend to be satisfied with little budgets, which is, in my opinion, harmful to the industry, if you do it for a living.
I wonder it's possible to make a browser extension that grabs incoming keystrokes and maps them from one keyboard layout to another? I know I've seen extensions add new keyboards shortcuts to webpages, but I'm not sure about sending custom key input to a page or blocking the original presses from going through.
And it's also possible that a game like this directly grabs input in a way that an extension couldn't intercept. Web dev is really not my thing.
I'm using Neo, and though I'm also used to keyboard switching, I'm very much accustomed to leave my fingers on the default position (i.e. my left index finger on qwertz [f], where the little marking is). Because of this I haven't gotten the hang of strafing for the ten levels I played and then it got very difficult to avoid.
Oh wow - thanks so much for this!! I just got a huge nostalgia hit back to the days of The Shadow of Yserbius/Fates of Twinion, which were some of the earliest games I played. I think both your game engine and art style have somehow captured the core of this type of game, even being realtime, and without the multiplayer or RPG elements.
I'm a big fan of web first development and I'll be sure to use this as an example of what's possible.
It's a decision we took in order to stay true to the genre of classic dungeon crawlers. We're planning to add mouse-look control because many people are asking for it.
Please do. The nostalgia factor of this game was limited to, "oh right, I remember when controls used to be shit" for me.
Otherwise pretty fun. You could get more out of it by having higher upgrade paths, and using standard controls would make the top-tier upgrades less necessary.
The game is cool, the tech is impressive, but the controls are shite.
>Also, be sure to try the mobile version with your phone or tablet.
This. On desktop is nothing impressive, but on a phone it really amazed me - works very well, looks nice. And it's running in Safari. Good job. Will play it on my next bus ride, cheers.
Game is practically unplayable in Firefox Developer Edition on OSX. The first key I press works but then triggers 'Find' and focus shifts away from the game screen to the 'Find' input field. Any workaround?
This is a really fun. Been playing around with this on Firefox on Android an Chrome on Android. Great to see a game that transitions smoothly from desktop to mobile.
Noticed that on mobile once you exit fullscreen by pressing the Android back button there is not a way to get back into fullscreen using both Firefox and Chrome on Android.
Congrats! You've done a very good job, the game is really visually appealing.
I've noticed a slight delay between inputs and execution (<300ms). It might be the animations length, or just the fact that I've racked up the key repeat frequency of my keyboard, or simply that I usually play faster paced games :)
The keyboard handling seems a bit off. If you hold S and then press C, you'll stop moving backwards even though you're still holding S. I often thought I was running into a wall or some other obstacle while in fact my input was simply being ignored.
Found a bug (I think): it seems like the cooldown on the attack of the red guy who shoots fireballs resets when he moves. If you strafe to dodge a fireball at close range, he strafes and fires instantly again.
I got really, really excited when I saw the 'select your keyboard' option! I got sad again when there wasn't a Dvorak keyboard option. Is there any chance you'll be adding a Dvorak option?
Really great job. Is there something I need to enable in chrome to use hardware for graphics? The macbook with iris sounds like it's about to take off. Thank you
It's already using your GPU. Iris is just not a very powerful one, so we can't do much about it. We've actually noticed a better graphical performance on an iPhone 6 or iPad Air 2 than on a 13-inch Macbook Pro with Iris.
I think it's fun and has a lot of potential. There's some fun combos I started to be able to pull off in the video the more I played. I think this could lead to some really interesting multiplayer combat. If you look at what people have added on to Minecraft as PvP game modes, I think a lot would carry over well to this engine.
I would really like to remap the keys! I can dodge strafe left but not right because of muscle memory. In the video, you can see this makes me attempt to fire the bow when I should be strafing right.
A few suggestions, if you want to develop it further:
) Have an experience point system that grants you access to other skills (could be as simple as faster walking, more hps, regen, etc)
) By level 13, I had no more need for gold because I purchased everything in the shop already. Maybe add on extra purchases like increased inventory space for arrows, etc...
) Add a shield to help block some of the ranged attacks (the physical non-magic attacks)
) Harder AI as you level up would be nice, you can see in the video that creatures don't attack me even though I'm near and they should be able to hear me attacking their friends.
I'm sure I could come up with more suggestions if you want to focus on the game mode more.
Just watched your video. Well played!
Thanks for your detailed feedback, I agree the AI could be more difficult but we also have seen a lot of players finding the game a bit too hard.
About the shield I would disagree, strafing/moving to avoid a range attack is part of the core gameplay and a fun element, imho.
We will definitely work on some improvements to the game in the future.
Why aren't you frustrated at the continued existence of azerty? I lived for a few years in France and I always had to ask for a US keyboard or my brain would just get too confused keeping azerty and qwerty separate.
Now I'm back in Italy and I still prefer the US layout for the convenient position of brackets and braces, but at least the 26 letters are in the same place as the US keyboard.
Slight variations of qwerty are IMHO much worse than completely different standards like imperial vs. metric units because they are too close to keep separate in my brain.
azerty is a cultural thing. You learn to use them as a kid, and so most french are used to them. How can someone feels frustrated by something that feels completely natural?
Pro tip: alt+shift switchs the layout between azerty and qwerty
What I would really prefer is to be able to set your own keys, probably with some defaults for common layouts. That way you serve any layout and any key usage habits.
Very fun game, actually surprisingly so. But one niggle, when you are turning left or right, it always seems to turn you one beat too far than you would think it would turn you. It's probably just a feel thing, but it took me out of the flow a bit. But other than that, it's as smooth as better and really nice.
I'm curious as to why more WebGL games aren't popular? Is it due to the infancy of the WebGL scene or is WebGL just not capable of creating great games yet?
I suppose it's mainly due to the infancy of WebGL. The technology itself is well capable of creating good games, which I hope Keep Out! helps to demonstrate.
While this is certainly an impressive demonstration of the WebGL platform, I find the game itself to be not much more than that. Lots of potential, though!
This works really great on Android Chrome, it is pretty close to an app experience (not being 60fps is the biggest giveaway). Speaking of Android, FYI the Orientation API is available, so you can lock to landscape and avoid that Portrait interstitial. `screen.orientation.lock('landscape')` at the time of this writing :)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the keyboard selection. So many cool web game demos assume querty which makes it really inconvenient or even impossible to play them without changing the keyboard layout in the OS, but that's asking a bit much for trying out some game demo.
There's this keyboard selection thing in the Ubuntu installation that asks you to type in a few keys, like "Type any of AZ123...". Perhaps this could be useful here?
Thanks! We definitely plan to write more details about the development process.
About the 3D models, just to clear up any confusion, we did not make them. They were bought from bitgem3d.com which offers amazing assets for 3D games.
It's a very good game, fun, easy and addictive. Keep working on it as a side project and this might turn into something really great. A really nice showcase for your agency!
Although i will echo what other people said, once you go mouse look you never go back.
There's a weird bug in the shop screen when you click left or right more than two times the 2nd+ time it seems to scroll multiple times (it actually only moves you one across, but the animation looks like it scrolls multiple times).
Looks good. One bug I found though: I have my Firefox window on OSX positioned on the left half of my 2560x1440 screen, and I could complete the first level fine, but when I got in the shop, the screen turned totally black after getting a message about having to buy a sword.
When I made the window only a little wider, I could see the shop interface perfectly fine and continue with the game.
One critique, the controls feel a little bit off when moving.
There's a slight jerk when moving from space to space instead of fluid motions. I understand that there might be a need to slow down when moving between spaces, for input actions, but I'd recommend decelerating when landing on spaces instead of "stopping." It has a sort of negative visual effect.
There is. Your progress is automatically saved in local storage, so if you come back later, you will continue right where you left (except that the level will be regenerated).
>3d view is though is not. it works on a 2d grid but it gets weird when you move in 90 degrees in a 3d game
From 1980-ish to the mid 1990s this was how "3D" dungeon crawlers worked; anyone who played Wizardry, or the Bard's Tale, or Might and Magic, or the SSI Gold Box RPGs, etc., will feel right at home.
Ah, feels like Eye Of The Beholder all over again, nice work! Very polished and I love the graphical style :-) Minor bug report regarding the audio which started off fine but got progressively more and more stuttery until I couldn't hear anything at all, around level 5 or 6 - it was breaking up like a bad phone line. I'm using Firefox 40.0.3 on Windows 7 x64.
I still didn't try it because I'm at work right now, but I'd really like to read about the development, I'm using three.js right now on a project and would love to read about your current architecture, how do you manage 3D models, if you use modules and how, etc. As soon as I get home I'll try it, congratulations on the release!
Does not work well on my Windows tablet- I assume it presents a touch interface for Android and iOS? It assumes I have a keyboard, and I can't see a way to turn on a touch interface by hand. HP Stream 7, Windows 8.1.
You can play most of the game with one hand on the keyboard, but you're forced to use the mouse instead of the spacebar to close popups and to purchase things.
