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Very cool! Just a few hiccups I ran into:

  • At a resolution of 1280x720 the UI didn't fit onto the screen so I couldn't access the options menu
  • As you said, sometimes I spawned under the map. This can be fixed by having the player spawn higher, or using a raycast to spawn the player directly onto the terrain
  • Sometimes if I hit the ground too hard I would clip through the map and fall under the world. I had to try 6 or 7 times until I gave up trying to get to the pyramid, because I clipped through the map each time.

Until the clipping issues are fixed, teleporting the player above the map whenever their Y-value is less than -100, for example, would be a much better solution than making them restart the game.

Otherwise, the gliding was very nice whenever I managed to get some speed, and the stars at night were very pretty. I have some suggestions though:

  • Try adding several layers of noise to make the terrain more varied
  • I found it very difficult to change my direction of movement

That said, I LOVED the game's atmosphere once it turned night, and I think it's definitely the game's strong point and that there's a lot of potential. Have you considered scrapping the day-night cycle all together and just making the game set at night? And here are some ideas to make it even more pretty (feel free to ignore me):

  • placing stars more densely around a belt in the sky (the milky way) and less densely everywhere else, rather than evenly placed everywhere.
  • making the sky a gradient between dark blue near the horizon and black as you go higher
  • stars dimmer closer to the horizon and brighter as you go higher
  • some subtle variation in star colour and brightness
  • make them twinkle?

And a few questions: is there an objective I should be doing? It says in the game description that there's a win condition but I couldn't figure it out. Also, is the terrain infinite?

Can't wait to see what the game becomes!

@botmark,

Thank you so much for experiencing The Living Sands! I'm aware that there are some issues related to clipping through the terrain with the player and vehicle, and it's my intention to fix those as soon as possible. As it stands, I'll make a note about that in the product description.

The objective of the game so far is to collect a relic at the center of a maze which is "inside" the tetrahedron. Pressing 'I' while in-game will bring up the hint menu, though I'll cut to the chase and just say to stand near the edge closest to the sunset and look at the point for a few seconds!

As for your suggestions, thanks for those! I had some ideas about how I wanted the atmosphere to work and these will fit perfectly into my framework. I'd also like to add a moon or a planet for some extra ambiance.

Thanks again!