Walking Simulator

Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.27

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.34

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.42

Theme★★★★★★★★★★1.97

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.51

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.10

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.82

At the bleeding edge of 3d engine development, and 10 years of hard work, we present:

A walk simulator. WASD to move.

Coding/engine by Tero Pulkkinen

Music created by Esa Pulkkinen.

External technologies used(in order of importance):
* sketchfab 3d model collection,
* meshy AI 3d model generation from prompt,
* stable diffusion png file generation from prompt
* chatgpt AI assistant helping coding tasks/optimization
* claude AI assistant helping with coding
* blender for their decimate algorithm
* tinygltf asset parsing library,
* stb_image image parsing and loading header-only library,
* emscripten c++ development environment and compiler for web,
* SDL2 our favourite library for opening windows and accessing opengl
* c++ programming language,
* openGL/webgl rendering technologies,
* chromium/firefox web browsers,
* linux/windows operating systems,

Internal technologies used(in order of importance):
* GameApi Builder tool,
* GameApi library/3d engine,
* meshpage.org web site.

Stuff that does not seem to work:
* animation for water
* more complex gameplay
* edges for the scene
* builder tool AI nodes
* android support

Fixes done after jam:
* performance optimizations
* fix for projection matrix, border rendering, walk animations.
* decimated the meshes to get it run on low-end hardware => works ok now.
* added lod implementation/now far distance has different quality 3d model
* perspective matrix changes

Tools: Blender, ChatGPT, SDL, Stable Diffusion

Comments54

Teamofey Izorsky5 Apr 2025, 07:44

My fav

LDJam user 3828195 Apr 2025, 07:51

LOL！

Tero Pulkkinenauthor5 Apr 2025, 08:12

Guess it shows what will be the result when you let community loose with newest AI technologies.

okuar5 Apr 2025, 17:55

OMG! 😆

infecsean6 Apr 2025, 05:29

damn. i'll be dreaming about this for sure

ROBOWARRIOR19826 Apr 2025, 09:36

Well this have a lot of potential, i hope there is hidden thing if i continue to walk in the void of the depths. I like mysteries. (the game work fine on my firefox version after a little time to loading).

Tero Pulkkinenauthor6 Apr 2025, 13:41

@robowarrior1982 Good to know that firefox might be fixed. I probably have old firefox version and performance is slower than turtle.

Placeholders7 Apr 2025, 05:07

core memory unlocked
this is so wonderfully weird

BadPinkChicken7 Apr 2025, 09:44

Damn, those graphics bring up memories!

GrayLove7 Apr 2025, 14:52

The Best game of
LD57

Prunus Padis7 Apr 2025, 14:55

Hmm what to say, intresting choice of camera angel. Whole thing gives dreamy wibes.

I hope you had fun jam and learned a lot :D Im pretty impressed that it runs on browser (used edge).

TasakaSama7 Apr 2025, 16:36

Basically, that's all there is to it, there's nothing to say :) thanks for that

ssiannas7 Apr 2025, 17:38

A modern day Sisyphus

DzejPi7 Apr 2025, 18:38

I remember seeing this when checking new posts during breaks. So, I couldn't wait to try this one. Maybe this will become another game that will be used as a benchmarking tool, keep up!

Tero Pulkkinenauthor8 Apr 2025, 00:15

BONUS POINTS AVAILABLE: to anyone who walks to the edge of the forest...

JB Rock8 Apr 2025, 01:12

True to the title. It did simulate walking haha. Good animation.
Definitely fitting with theme being in the jungle.

LDJam user 4080738 Apr 2025, 02:32

10/10 game no critique necessary. i'd pay AAA prices for this

Tero Pulkkinenauthor8 Apr 2025, 08:15

PRO TIP: should reserve the name for the entry before anyone in LD manages to make walking sim. Everyone else with walking sim have just urls with funny numbers, when I can enjoy full power of walking simulator godness.

Yopin8 Apr 2025, 11:12

ElephantMan

DevilXrom8 Apr 2025, 21:31

Brooo! What were you on when you made this?!

Ricesteam10 Apr 2025, 08:10

Finally, a worthy meme game.

C0SMIC10 Apr 2025, 08:42

This was an absolute fever dream I love it

YibiRabbit00710 Apr 2025, 09:28

Man I cannot image what did you do for this game,too abstract

ybzpp10 Apr 2025, 10:08

stunning walking simulator, i like it)

Sharky318810 Apr 2025, 10:17

Wild ride.

mrpoopybutthole10 Apr 2025, 10:58

Ok?

Tero Pulkkinenauthor10 Apr 2025, 15:50

@yibirabbit007 Check the source.txt, it explains everything...

detectiveLosos10 Apr 2025, 21:54

I mean, it does what it says on the cover, it's a very detailed simulation of walking. So detailed in fact, that it simulates the whole existential crisis going through the mind of the elephant-man when he realizes that he lives in a procedurally generated world, hence it's not quite real-time yet, but we are getting there. Truly state of the art. Makes me wonder what is possible to achieve in another 10 years with this pace of technology advancement!

Tero Pulkkinenauthor10 Apr 2025, 22:07

@detectiveLosos: in 10 years our engine can reach the same level than where unity, unreal and godot is today. So with our resources, we're constantly running to catchup professional engines coming from larger teams. But what saves us is that the technical limitations are killing many of the ideas that larger teams are doing, so if we reach the limits of technology, we have a chance to catchup. Just need to ensure that the quality is good enough that after reaching tech limits, we're able to compete.

Alvaron11 Apr 2025, 16:15

Slow and unplayable on my machine. :/

Tero Pulkkinenauthor11 Apr 2025, 17:58

@alvaron yeah, web browsers enforce certain rules for security, and one of the rules is that long running tasks shouldn't be used in main event loop. On slower machines, this means our game is considered as running long task, given that it misses the time allocated for frames in 60fps stuff. But what a browser does in this situation, is that it makes the software completely unusable as it starts to miss the following 7 frames too, making it unplayable.

kuboi11 Apr 2025, 20:10

Absolute Cinema.

LDJam user 23459712 Apr 2025, 18:19

I guess stable diffusion takes the cake on this one for the vines (?). Also, there's an A-pose of something trying to come out of the A-pose of the elephant guy. Use of substances encouraged. :)
Serious props though for the runtime generation of the environment! If you ever consider switching engines, I can hook you up. :)

deformhead12 Apr 2025, 20:13

GOTY! :clap:

Tero Pulkkinenauthor12 Apr 2025, 20:34

@heviosso: yeah, I'm still optimizing it for getting it to work on low-end computers. Damn optimizations are required to get it running 60fps on low-end computers. No luck yet on that though. Optimizations caused temporarily some rendering issues.

LDJam user 23459712 Apr 2025, 20:46

@tero-pulkkinen How low are we talking? Last I checked, my thingy did ~2fps on RPi. If I were to believe the internet, adding a vulkan renderer would make it ~4fps. Can't win them all.

Tero Pulkkinenauthor12 Apr 2025, 21:51

@heviosso well, i expect some gpu cards from the computer...

Geckoo133712 Apr 2025, 21:58

Interesting tech demo. Cool graphics. It works as expected ++

daniel13 Apr 2025, 20:14

Does what it says on the cover. Excellent music bring the whole vibe up.

muriel13 Apr 2025, 20:43

muriel13 Apr 2025, 20:44

Having done the whole engine, having a walking simulator instead of a triangle simulator is an amazing achivement!! :)

Toupaks13 Apr 2025, 21:06

The boss at the edge of the forest is really cool !

Tero Pulkkinenauthor13 Apr 2025, 21:10

@Toupaks: LOL.

Empyreans14 Apr 2025, 16:25

Had a sweet little time walking on stream xD

~Xp

Cobear2514 Apr 2025, 16:45

Haha nice. I actually do like the vibes, would have been cool if you had more time to add some sort of gameplay.

Tero Pulkkinenauthor14 Apr 2025, 17:05

@cobear25 yeah, I decided to try to optimize the world rendering, since it's the first time I have such huge forest/jungle in a game. So gameplay elements are non-existing. Decided it early/got the walking simulator name reserved early in LD. But better get my engine correctly implemented rather than go with short-lived gameplay elements.

Tero Pulkkinenauthor14 Apr 2025, 19:10

Good news. Got the game to work on low-end laptops by decimating the 3d models with blender. Now the rendering takes 6.1ms which is within the 10ms time budget reserved for browser's animation loop. => low-end laptop users can now enjoy the production.

Tero Pulkkinenauthor17 Apr 2025, 18:48

Status report on lod support: Looks like lod is working, but performance of lod isn't as good as I hoped. Rendering high-quality meshes are still more expensive than I wished, and got 15ms rendering time for the lod support. Sadly that's not enough to reach the browser's 10ms time limit.

Nescre19 Apr 2025, 06:22

The outlines over the player model reminded me a lot of Hades. Cool proof of concept man - having done the whole engine yourself is an impressive feat. Looking forward to seeing where else you take it.

Only slight bug I noticed was that, on my 144hz monitor, the game would speed up significantly for short periods of time when changing focus to another window. This amount of time would vary based on how long the window was out of focus.

chuckeles19 Apr 2025, 10:55

Lol :cookie:

Houmgaor19 Apr 2025, 21:03

I played the optimized version of the game to truly appreciate the details of the walking in unwavering fps. One cannot do else but wonder what strange lands and distant past the elephant-man must have gone through. Some authors may know how to inspire fear and joy and the hearts of man, yet elephant-man displays such an audacious performance as to exponentially combine all emotions to the hitherto unnamed new height.

Bold men may claim to perceive War and Nature, wise men the elephant-man we all hold deep inside. But the thoughtful would remain silent, as thee who wants to understand Walking Simulator cannot be taught, but should play the game himself.

EDIT: great music btw

Igor Korobeinikov21 Apr 2025, 11:20

Absolute cinema!
Loved the character and how misic matches with his drammatic story. Narrative part in general is really good
Some missions are a bit complicated and frustrating closer to the middle of the game, but it really worth it - ending tears a soul apart frfr
Good job!

Jorgen22 Apr 2025, 02:37

Bought rtx 5090 just to play this, thank you.

Tero Pulkkinenauthor27 Apr 2025, 16:53

I'll need to apply to clown school given that humor category got the best result...