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In a world of black and white, ones and zeros, a being comes to be. Trapped in a bizarre environment filled with puzzles, circuitry and snakes, the being needs to push forward!

This is a relatively short puzzle game (~10 min, give or take).
Note that this game utilizes the DynRPG patch and some rather special code, by rm2k3 standards anyway, meaning there is a chance the game will simply not run on your computer, in particular if you're using a particularly old computer.

This is a tiny game made for the 1.44 Floppy Disk Drive challenge, where the participating games should fit (in compressed format), into a standard 1.44MB floppy disk.

Do please leave a comment if the game crashed or the like, so that I can determine just brittle the plugin I wrote for this project actually is.

Latest Blog

Implicit Surface Shenanigans



I'm still playing around a little bit with things which I would like to see in the game. In particular I wanted to be able to have the ray tracer animate a collapsing floor as can be seen in the gif above.

What's happening there is that I'm tracing something referred to as an implicit surface, in particular one in the form of something to the tune of
-1 / (x² + y²) + z = 0

Initially I was thinking I could just spline together two 2nd degree polynomials, but when I thought I little bit about it, I realized it wouldn't really be depressing in a circular fashion if I'd go for that, so I had to go for something more like described above... which unfortunately leads to a third degree polynomial and needing to solve it for its roots.

There is an analytical formula for solving a cubic equation, but it generally involves messing about with complex numbers. That's fine enough in itself, but it can quickly lead to a bunch of numerical issues due to the imperfect accuracy of such numbers on a computer. You only want to consider the solutions with real numbers, but there will often be a tiny little something left in the imaginary part which you need to ignore. I needed to set the thresholds surprisingly high to avoid artifacts from popping up.

I could have chosen an iterative solution for this as well. Would have avoided complex numbers, but comes with it's own set of issues. I've never really used the cubic formula before, so it was interesting to mess around a little bit with it, and I'm happy with the end result
  • Production
  • Kazesui
  • RPG Tsukuru 2003
  • Adventure Puzzle
  • 04/28/2021 11:36 PM
  • 05/23/2021 02:00 AM
  • N/A
  • 9787
  • 2
  • 88

Posts

Pages: 1
Unbelievable! I mean... at first it started like most puzzles and it lookd like there was even a backstory, then the 1st person 3d part... whoa and is this RPG Tsukuru 2003? Awesome. More a dreamlike experience and art than a game, I guess. The end was abrupt but no crash at all. Nice!
Thanks for the feedback. More of an experience is what I was going for and yeah ending was a bit abrupt, mostly because I hadn't implemented a proper way of actually exiting the game.
And yeah, that's 3D in rm2k3, but to be fair it's almost purely C++
iddalai
RPG Maker 2k/2k3 for life, baby!!
1194
Couldn't get it to run, unfortunately.

Even before it started I got 2 different “.dll” errors and then I got a black screen with music.

The game refuses to work on my computer. The music was good though.
Thank you for trying. I was worried something like this wouldn't be all too unlikely. If you don't mind, could you please share your computer specs? CPU and GPU if you have one should suffice, and also the .dll error in particular if you could.
Thanks
author=TheNecromancer
Doesn't run
<helpful image>


Thanks, that's good help, albeit also a bit curious.
Could you do me a favour and try to run this variant of the game as well?
https://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/3355/locker/Unbit005_DEBUG.zip
This is not a fixed version of the game or anything, but rather a debug version which opens a console window and prints a bunch of logs as to what is happening in the background. I would love to know what the console window says as it will probably give a good clue as to what the real error is
iddalai
RPG Maker 2k/2k3 for life, baby!!
1194
author=Kazesui
Thank you for trying. I was worried something like this wouldn't be all too unlikely. If you don't mind, could you please share your computer specs? CPU and GPU if you have one should suffice, and also the .dll error in particular if you could.
Thanks


I was curious about the game because you usually make these technically incredible projects with RPG Maker (...even if sometimes they are quite hard to beat!).

The issue is probably that I'm using an old computer and missing some files that are common for the latest Operative Systems.

I'm not too knowledgeable about hardware, so I hope I'm sending the right information.

https://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/21676/locker/specserrors.png
author=iddalai
I was curious about the game because you usually make these technically incredible projects with RPG Maker (...even if sometimes they are quite hard to beat!).

The issue is probably that I'm using an old computer and missing some files that are common for the latest Operative Systems.

I'm not too knowledgeable about hardware, so I hope I'm sending the right information.

https://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/21676/locker/specserrors.png


That is the correct information indeed. The good news is that it seems that your hardware, or at least your GPU, should theoretically be able to run it. The bad news is that it if it doesn't, it likely means the driver with the correct dll in question was not pre-installed, and chasing down that driver could prove tricky and I'm not entirely sure I would recommend going through the hassle for a 10 minute game unfortunately.

I'm working on a workaround, but I'm not too sure how well it will work in terms of performance, just that it should work.
On that note, I've updated the download with a version which should work even if parts of the code should be unhappy with the computer. Not entirely sure if it ignores dll errors though, even if in theory it should.
iddalai
RPG Maker 2k/2k3 for life, baby!!
1194
Sorry, I still get the same errors. Thanks for trying!
I'll just wait until someone records a playthrough for me to see how the game looks like.
The last version you sent me worked. I was able to do the first person view part, although it brought me back to 2D and I didn't see anywhere else to go.

I saw a few paths blocked by doors but after exploring what I had available and coming up empty, I decided to quit. Did I miss the grande finale?

It's interesting. I didn't catch on to the binary puzzles until towards the end. So I simply kept switching things until I could move forward. The simon says thing seemed weird at times. Like it was asking me to hit 2 different squares, but when I hit the first one I get stuck and new ones spin. First person turning speed is a little slow, oh and that effect on your name at the start was a little slow as well. At first it was pretty cool but it dragged on a little too long heh


That music sounded familiar in tone and composition, did you use one of those tools where AI makes up a song based on instruments and variables you choose?
author=TheNecromancer
The last version you sent me worked. I was able to do the first person view part, although it brought me back to 2D and I didn't see anywhere else to go.

I saw a few paths blocked by doors but after exploring what I had available and coming up empty, I decided to quit. Did I miss the grande finale?

You did miss the finale, though it's not overly grande. You might have missed it as it's rather unintuitive. If you head up after the returning to 2D, you might notice that two binary streams which were zero before have swapped to ones, allowing you to open the doors by toggling the accessible buffers in that room.
This is not how I had planned it, and there's no good indication for this, but I ran a bit short on time for the event.

It's interesting. I didn't catch on to the binary puzzles until towards the end. So I simply kept switching things until I could move forward. The simon says thing seemed weird at times. Like it was asking me to hit 2 different squares, but when I hit the first one I get stuck and new ones spin. First person turning speed is a little slow, oh and that effect on your name at the start was a little slow as well. At first it was pretty cool but it dragged on a little too long heh



Yeah, I imagine the average player will not be familiar with logic gates, so I tried to keep it relatively simple, to the point that just toggling the buffers randomly will work relatively fine.

As for the Simon says puzzle, when you hit the first one and it interrupts you, it usually means that you hit the wrong square. That said, there could be some bugs still in it which I didn't capture.

And yes, the rotation is a tad slow by design, but I should probably fix that. The corridors are a bit narrow relative to the hit box, something I didn't realize until I started making the hit collision for the 3D environments, meaning fine tuning the turning was a bit more important than usual rotation speed. There probably is some leeway in there which I should still fix for though.
And yes, the intro is far too long, especially for how short the game is. It is definitely something I want to shorten, although it also has a lower priority than other things I need to take care of.


That music sounded familiar in tone and composition, did you use one of those tools where AI makes up a song based on instruments and variables you choose?


Nope, the music is primarily sourced from good old vgmusic. I don't know of too many services which generate good midi music with AI, as most of the sources I know tend to generate soundwaves themselves which are not particularly storage efficient. Implementing an AI model to do this in the actual plugin would likely also not work that well, since the AI models tend to be a bit too big, and not easy to compress down to a size suitable for a 1.44MB challenge.

Thanks for the feedback, and for playing the game
Well, I say AI but maybe just simple computation. But I meant something like this https://tones.wolfram.com/generate/GIt40IeS5xcgR5CMWvC5PdGGIpDm6BjMvAzJCWZJhejl9X

I never said it made good midi music heh but the song you picked had a weird pace. The sound of the instruments and the sort of normal, but odd adherense to time signature(and odd repetition of notes) of the song you picked sounded like most of the songs this site spits out.
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