Seems like all the cool kids are posting about their games, and I wanna be cool too!

Check it out here: https://pawa.itch.io/strata

Feedback here: https://itch.io/jam/1-bit-jam-4/rate/3026320

This only was my second jam, and the first by myself. My first jam was with a friend just a little over a month ago, and it went great. One of the ideas we talked about then was to explore cellular automata as a game play mechanic. We couldn’t then, but since that’s an idea that has been on my mind for years now, I used the 1-bit jam as the kick in the pants I needed.

It really made sense, cellular automata are binary; each cell is either on or off. I like the way these very simple systems can yield very complicated behaviors and beautiful results with a simple set of rules. The same way that the minimalism of a black/white restriction can help focus an art piece, be it a photograph or a video-game.

When the theme - Tower - was revealed, everything fit into place. I had already been thinking about ways to model a little society and introducing resource management to the classic neighbor-based algorithms we see in cellular automata. So with Tower, it became obvious: a stratified society, stacked vertically. Strata

Because verticality was so important and I thought right off the bat that it would look super cool to have that woosh when we change floors, it was obvious right away that 3D was the way to go. I had never made anything serious in 3D in Godot, but I figured that since I would just be using simple cubes, I’d be fine (foreshadowing)

Setting up the graphics and animations was rather simple, and I even made a simple shader to use per-instance uniforms so I could color each cell as it ages. I’m an absolute noob at shaders, so I was pretty happy

I made a fatal mistake, though. Even though I knew I wanted the game to be playable on the browser, I didn’t really test it until it was almost done. In the past I’ve done similar things in Unity and never really had issues, so I assumed Godot would be just as accommodating

I assumed wrong! When I tested it on the browser, the GUI was fine, but NONE of the 3D appeared. Nothing at all, black screen

I was dealing with roughly 3500 cells total at that stage, and in the interest of time I didn’t optimize a single damned thing. After all, while testing with an integrated graphics card I even had effects and sheez and the game was looking great at ~60fps (CPU bound), so there was clearly no need to optimize anything, we’re good baby!

Thing is, on Desktop and Mobile by default Godot uses a Vulkan-based renderer that is performant, full of features and overall awesome. On Web however, it needs to use an OpenGL 3 based compatibility renderer that is much more limited. No effects, much smaller limits on things like how many meshes it can render at once and no per-instance uniforms! I could only get it to show anything at all when I reduced the tower to just 3 strata. That was not nearly enough

So I ended up having to spend the two last days of the Jam refactoring my approach and using multimeshes instead of individual objects - basically, several mesh instances are combined in a single mesh resulting in a single draw call, but retaining the ability to be individually positioned and colored. A bit like dynamic batching in Unity, with different trade-offs.

I’m glad I didn’t go this route right away because it allowed me some freedom to experiment, but I’m glad to say implementing this was much easier than I feared. The more I use Godot the more I like it, it’s uncanny. So when I was done, I reduced my draw calls from a peak of ~2500 to ~45. The multimesh also allowed me to easily set vertex colors, so I used that to make cells darken with age instead of the unsupported-on-web per-instance uniforms. A good solution solves multiple problems, right?

Didn’t really have time to find a way to make the glow effect on the web. Pretty bummed about that, it adds so much to the game

I’m really happy about the sound component of the game too. I HATE, and I mean HATE making sound design and overall working with sound. But for this project I was unusually inspired. Found some great atmospheric samples and kept everything very grounded, very natural. Rocks and water sounds mostly, a heartbeat to signal the passage of time, some wind and some birds… I really like the atmosphere and I think all sounds really help each other shine, it’s a cohesive package.

Here again I had some really annoying technical limitations. I don’t really get why, but Godot’s audio system really doesn’t like to be on the web. I thought it was related to threading, but I tried exporting with threads on and off and didn’t really see any difference. I’m sad to say that the web experience is rather worse than a native build on this aspect too. Sounds that didn’t loop as they should, and audio effects are just outright missing. Not happy about that at all, but also not really sure how I can improve that. Definitely not with the time I had left

I was adamant on having a web version to make everyone’s life easier to test the game (and to make sure I knew what people were going to experience, since I’m on Linux and most people are on Windows - always risky to ship builds I can’t properly test). But I admit I’m not super thrilled about the result. Which is why I still recommend the native versions, even if I understand the obvious friction they entail, no one has the time for that.

363 entries as of writing, that’s awesome! Can’t wait to test some of these, and I’m sure every participant is feeling the same!

I think this wall of text has grown enough, so I’m gonna leave it here with some closing thoughts.

Strata was made as an art piece as much as a game. I sincerely hope you have fun with it, but I do hope it provokes other feelings as well, good or bad.

It has some hidden meanings (maybe not so hidden, it’s hard for me to tell) that may look like bugs but aren’t. Some political and philosophical views, and certainly a lot of me in it. It turned out as quite the portrait of where I am and how I think and see things at this point in my life. And I am very happy with the result.

Thank you to MYline media for organizing the Jam, a big thank you to everyone that plays Strata, and an even bigger one to the brave souls that made it this far into my ramblings!

Keep being awesome <3 Talk to you soon