Post by Falsely in The Dark Room jam comments

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So my first time playing this was a bit frustrating, as I got this really weird glitch where the pen would refuse to lock on to surfaces. This left me drawing surreal patterns in the air. Thought I was playing some sort of avante-garde perspective piece like Superliminal, until I took another look at the gif and went "no. wait. I've broken it."

Rebooting the game fixed it, and I haven't been able to replicate the bug since, so the mystery of all that will haunt me. But moving on.

Fun concept! Took a bit to get used to the drawing controls but once I got the hang of it I could do it consistently. Felt good zipping all over town via the hub dimension and there's real potential there for puzzles or speedrunning. Gravity gets weird and nausea-inducing if you open a portal on the ground though.

In terms of visuals - I'm not sure if this project is going to lean more realistic (like the buildings) or stylistic, but I will say I rather like the gradient effect on the particles and the trees. Placeholder or not there's something charming about it.

Good luck with development! I'd love to see more of this!

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ZeroTheDogGames1 year ago(+1)

I have seen the bug! Like you, I've only seen it once and found it to be amazingly difficult to replicate. I haven't been able to pin down what causes it. The drawing uses a raycast that goes out from the camera in the direction of the calculated in-world mouse position to determine what surface to draw on, so my suspicions are that it has something to do with when the camera locks to the game window? There is a lingering FIXME in my code for this :P

Regardless, I really appreciate you giving it another go! I'm happy to hear the you got the hang of the controls. That was something I was worried about. The controls feel better in the latest version thanks to Victfy's suggestion!

Drawing on the floor definitely needs some work. The rotations I perform so that I can order the detected corner points (for generating the mesh) don't work as expected for flat surfaces because they don't take into account the direction the player was facing when drawing. I also don't do any vertical rotation on the player yet which should probably be some kind of slerp function. It might be a good idea to add some vertical velocity when coming out of a ground portal too.

I'm happy to hear about the trees! Those were made by my brother, so I'll pass along the compliment! Haven't nailed down a visual style just yet, but it's always good to get that kind of feedback early!

Thank you again for playing!

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