Darkness has descended upon our puddle, little one. But, with the lantern as your guardian, we can relight the braziers. Venture forth and reclaim our home, little ember.
Please turn off your lights and use headphones for the best experience.
W to swim forward, A and D to turn, Mouse to direct the Emberlight
Made using Unity and Blender
Itch: https://noscopegreatsword.itch.io/emberlight Checkpoints and level improvements build on Itch! Linux too! Apologies for the lack of checkpoints in the LD version. But please do not consider the updated builds for the rating.
Credits: Design by Siddharth Menon and Vedaant Sukhtankar, 3D Modelling and Animation by Aatman Dhangar, 2D Art by Anand Merchant
Great mood, very mysterious symbols. It was unfortunate to go back to the start after fully lighting up 2 braziers. Sounds and mood were top notch. Well done.
Pretty cool atmosphere, I like a lot the reflection on the water, even though it's a bit too bright compared to the rest of the game, I was wondering at first wether it was a gameplay element or not. I think everything was a little too dark, but I know it's hard to do right when the light is a gameplay mechanic. The game is simple but interesting, I didn't read the description before playing but found out easily what to do. It's a bit ruthless though, having a few lives before having to restart would make the game a bit less frustrating.
I really enjoyed the dialogue and lighting reflections. Trying to shine lights on the braziers while the water bugs tried to get you was pretty engaging. Good stuff guys :))
That was really cool experience but there wasn't much to do which made it feel very short. The basic mechanics and the atmosphere are great but there was only one bindstone and one enemy. I was expecting something cool to happen when I lit the stone, but nothing ever did. I swam around the entire pond and found nothing else so I let the enemy kill me.
Obviously 72 hours is not a lot of time to fill a game with content but I think a simple "Mission accomplished" screen would have been good to have so that players aren't left wandering confused after lighting the stone
@skleembof Thank you for the feedback. We didn't have a lot of time for level design and therefore didn't direct players well enough. There is actually an area to the North-east with more bindstones. We'll be adding a separate file on itch to address the core issues, separate from the jam submission.
atmosphere is good, but it seemed too dark for me, i could barely see anything. Also controls is very weird, at some point i pressed the up button to swim forward, but i started swimming backwards instead...
@meylish Thanks for the feedback! We opted for tank controls for this game. W moves the character in the direction it's facing. A and D let you rotate your character. This can be a little strange to get used to but we felt it worked better for our game.
Honestly the scariest part for me was that the enemy guys come at you butt first! But actually, I really enjoyed the vibes and concept. I'm glad you added the checkpoints, I definitely died a few more times than I should have which would have been fairly frustrating, if not for the checkpoints.
@wind1e Haha ya the butt first thing was unintentional. They turn away from you when they're in the light. Glad you enjoyed it. Checkpoints and fixing the level design were a priority for us but we just barely missed adding it to the LD build.
Like others pointed out, the atmosphere in this game is excellent! The shadows of leaves together with the music and the sound effects can really pull you in, I was completely on edge all the way through while playing this. I managed to light all the beacons in the end, but it was tense all the way through, at the end I felt striders could jump out at me from any direction. Very well crafted! The look of everything was beautiful as well, especially the lighting effect on the water, the light reflections looked amazing. Great game, very well done!
I see what you were trying to achieve with this one. Really great work with the level composition, enemies behavior, mystery, ambient effects and music. This game would extremely benefit from some additional sounds for enemy encounters.
Sound design is everything for horrors! I would 'play' with the player with some subtle 'red-eyes' blinking when enemy is engaging, may be some random chirp sounds, water effects in the dark (especially since you have such a glorious reflections), and certainly -- sound effects for different levels of proximity with the enemy. Overall a pretty solid entry. Never assumed I would worry about a water bug so much. 😅
@icxon Thank you for the detailed feedback. The video is especially helpful since we can try and adjust the level accordingly. I will also try and get that game over + game win at the same time condition sorted 😅
I found the game very beautiful and atmospheric. This is largely due to the excellent work with the sounds! Excellent ambient soundtrack. I don't agree with others that it is too dark, I think that it should be like this, but I would like that when a light turned on, there was a little more of it and, for example, the nearest bugs would disappear. Minuses - every time I lost, the game started from the very beginning and showed me the entire slow flight of the camera. I understand that this is just a jam game, but watching the same thing every time was a little boring.
@daria-toni Thank you for the feedback! We spent a lot of time trying to optimize for webgl which didn't work out, and then the checkpoints were not functional by the submission 😓 . Thank you for playing despite that issue :)
@chusmimax Thank you for saying so, the plan was to provide players with a wider beam, or higher movespeed each time they lit up a beacon, but we were worried about the game getting too easy and losing that tension of managing the striders. If we had more time we woulda tried stuff out to see what worked.
Comments40
The game is simple but interesting, I didn't read the description before playing but found out easily what to do. It's a bit ruthless though, having a few lives before having to restart would make the game a bit less frustrating.
Obviously 72 hours is not a lot of time to fill a game with content but I think a simple "Mission accomplished" screen would have been good to have so that players aren't left wandering confused after lighting the stone
We'll be adding a separate file on itch to address the core issues, separate from the jam submission.
This was a very atmospheric entry! Very ambitious to make a lighting-based game, well done!
Sound design is everything for horrors! I would 'play' with the player with some subtle 'red-eyes' blinking when enemy is engaging, may be some random chirp sounds, water effects in the dark (especially since you have such a glorious reflections), and certainly -- sound effects for different levels of proximity with the enemy. Overall a pretty solid entry. Never assumed I would worry about a water bug so much. 😅
Here is my playthrough:
Minuses - every time I lost, the game started from the very beginning and showed me the entire slow flight of the camera. I understand that this is just a jam game, but watching the same thing every time was a little boring.
@chusmimax Thank you for saying so, the plan was to provide players with a wider beam, or higher movespeed each time they lit up a beacon, but we were worried about the game getting too easy and losing that tension of managing the striders. If we had more time we woulda tried stuff out to see what worked.