All these different manifestations of individuality/individualism are so beautiful. I hope we will succeed in defending the liberal rights and freedoms for the generations to come.
Speaking of beautiful. You've hit the Antichamber look so well!
I tried climbing the diagonal pillar from trans to passing and could almost get there if it wasn't for the fence I might have been able to. Was that intentional as some kind of metaphor?
It wasnt intended (it was originally possible to jump off, but we ended up disallowing that in order to optimise performence) but there have been quite a few interpretations of rooms we didnt originally consider.
This game made me feel really seen during what is an incredibly difficult time. I don't know how this collection of cubes made me so emotional, but it certainly did. Thanks for making this game.
I like how it said male or female so I went through the pink door which i presume is for female. then there was a path with arrows and I ignored it and went the other way and it said trans which exactly me which I found hilarious.
Thank you for making this game! One of the developers commented on my YouTube playthrough already. Just thought I'd share it here as well. It had lovely use of color and design. The architecture is very clever at times.
I'm sorry to say there is no masc room. We had to make a somewhat arbitrary cutoff somewhere what terms we'd include and which we wouldn't get to and we decided we wanted to make it clear by the composition of the collection that the list of covered terms was incomplete. We added the map in order to help players figure out what they have already found and what remains to be discovered.
Also, I loved the game, very informative and can be so helpful for a lot of people. Me, as a gender fluid person, found it very relaxing and like a way to understand me a bit more. And also I freaking love the non-Euclidian space games, it's really awesome and confusing.
It was on the part of the 'CIS' sign. If you go around that same part over and over, the letters will go up and eventually disappear and that's where I fell of, at the end of the hallway.
Hope it's useful and you can fix it soon! Good luck!
Update: I've replayed it to test it out. You can get there by entering the trans room, going a bit further to the stairs, just to make the first room to transform in the loop, and then go back to the cis hallway and go around it in the opposite direction of the arrow, a few times. Eventually the hallway will end in a wall and you can pass through it and fall forever.
If you go around enough on the direction of the arrow, you'll get the cis sign to disappear completely, but I didn't get to fall like in the other direction.
I haven't tested it with the rest of the rooms, I have homework to do xD, but I hope this is helpful.
This game made me incredibly euphoric. I've always known I'm a trans man, but this game helped me explore my identity more. The pronoun doors were so fun, I think I've found some new ones! Absolutely love this game.
Tech wise this is basically Antichamber. How did you pull that off in 36 hours?
I do notice some visual glitches so portals aren't actually seamless in the game world - however you still have a proper portal renderer in there. Unity comes with the feature now, or did you manage to build that in that little time?
Certainly looks impressive.
Actually: just checked the code - it seems like Unity has Camera objects that do the heavy part of the work. Still quite an achievement to get this in 36 hours. Well done!
There are a couple of different mechanics we use for the effects.
For one we spawn and despawn copies of each room in relative positions to the room the player is currently in based on triggers set in this room. This allows us to have rooms that would intersect with each other or repeat endlessly.
The portals work by placing a second camera in the same relative position to the "portal exit" that the player has to the "portal entrence", rendering it to a render texture and then use a custom shader to istead of cropping it onto the portal plane cutting out the part of the fullscreen texture that intersects with the portalplane. The main problem with portals is that having multiple of them active at any given time can really drag down the performence so its key to deactivate them whenever they are not actually rendering anythign and avoid "portal loops".
For the queer room tunnell we project the player position onto a single axis and then rotate the room and its neighbours depending on a 180° Lerp with the projected player position as progress value.
The basic concepts arn't that hard to impliment in a limited amount of time (although the code is quite a bit messier than it needed to be due to the time constraints). It's the setting and testing of triggerboxes, anchorpoints etc. that takes most time. It should also be said that some of the rooms currently in the game were not present in the original jam release, but added later on.
Ah, you can spawn/despawn entire rooms in Unity. That of course helps and also allows some things to be done easier than the original Antichamber way (having native portals and enabling/disabling them at will).
Was rather curious as I was the one implementing the portal mechanics into DarkPlaces Quake engine + Xonotic and it was a lot harder there - well, none of these primitives were there though (except some existing engine code for rendering a scene in the same map to a texture which was used for water reflections). E.g. dynamically spawning entire rooms including objects is not possible even today, and the hacks that would allow sort of similar things are extremely slow as they would lose precomputed visibility information.
How I did it in the combination of DP + Xonotic was twofold: in DP I just provided "cameras" where game code can set the view origin of the camera, and in Xonotic I made all the other primitives (e.g. collision) aware of the portals.
In my game AAAAXY (which is 2D and thus I had no even remotely portal-capable engines available, but created my own) I went with a different way, to ensure portals have no glitches whatsoever; that way is however rather incompatible with multiplayer and thus I cannot generally recommend it. I basically decided to support portals in the tile loader itself and nowhere else, meaning everything else, including player movement, distance computations, tracing etc. work precisely the same whether portals are in the way or not. This approach may be applicable to 3D games as well, although as you describe portal tech in 3D is not particularly hard anyway, ESPECIALLY if given the primitives "Camera" and "copying rooms together" (in fact, with just copying rooms together and without cameras, you could already do portals the AAAAXY way and it will all be one render pass, although it may be slow to add/remove room parts at runtime and doing it like that everywhere also puts some annoying constraints).
While doing this, I also had the issue that third person portals are even more broken in general, as the typical way done in 3D engines only works for a first person view. To some extent this can be worked around, of course. What I ended up doing was introducing the same visibility mechanism as you know it from 3D games but applied to 2D - so anything the player cannot see is just black. Personally I got the idea from Among Us, but I must highlight https://alxwest.itch.io/kitakombs which discovered and released this tech independently on Itch before I finished my game.
There are a few ways to spawn/despawn full rooms in Unity. Given that this was a jam originally we took the simply road and made them all into prefabs, provided each room with a reference to each prefab that could spawn from it and the appropriate anchor points. The Trigger zones then call on the current Room to spawn/despawn them accordingly. Similar things can be done by treating rooms as seperate scenes and spawnnign them additively, but this does not work as neatly with having several copies of them and a few other thigns we do.
I'm allways happy to see different solutions for implementing non-eucledian levels. Will take a look at the ones you mentioned for sure =) Using similar mechanics in 2D is something I've always wanted to do but havn't gotten around to yet. I think this could be especially fun for sidescrollers, where having branching paths (other than having a bunch of background doors) can be a challenge.
BTW I think I forgot to mention - there is one way to do non-euclidean geometry in a 2D sidescroller without the visibility shadows that I did: if an entire screenful matches on the two ends of the portal, i.e. if overlaps are one screen away from the respective portal from which they are entered, then this can be done by transparently teleporting, as nothing on the screen would change during this.
A game that does this technique is none other than the original Super Mario Bros. in some of the castle levels (those where going a wrong path transparently brings you back to the start of the level). However in there the teleporting was not entirely transparent - they didn't clone some firebars to the destination side of the portal. This would have had an easy fix, of course; however due to how spawning works, it might have been tricky to put the "new" firebars in the same angle as the "old" ones, so this may be why they didn't.
The use of environmental story-telling is wonderful. The display and shape of each room creates the atmosphere of a museum, and this makes sense as each room contains a new concept to do with gender and identity. This actually reminds me of an in-person sexuality museum I visited in Glasgow; It was so validating and comforting seeing our community presented in a space made for the retention of historically important knowledge. The Queer community has lost so much of our history throughout time because of the lack of acceptance within the general public. Even when we have been documented in popular history it's been from an outsider point of view. Sometimes it feels we have been made a spectacle, not something to be understood but instead observed. To hear us tell our own stories and for them to be kept in a museum and seen as experiences worthy of sharing and protecting is unlike anything I've ever seen, and here I see it again in this game. Games can create an interactive narrative, providing a space for queer stories and experiences to survive, be shared and retold. Making a queer game and displaying it is revolutionary, because it demonstrates how we will never be lost to history again. This game is important, thank you for making it.
I even sent it to a friend who was questioning their own identity and it helped them feel so much better.
Thank you for sharing your experience with the game. It's incredibly heartworming to hear that our game is able to evoke such reactions. Also: The museum in glasgow you discribe sounds amazing and now we all wanna go there =] <3
So this ain't the game's fault, just thought this was kinda funny. When I got to the "map" area, I saw there was a square called "Map"....well, I misunderstood this and thought it meant "MAPS" like the pedophiles. So it boggled my mind that this would be included here (Like, I was legit wondering wtf it would say about MAPS), so I had to go find it...Took me 10 minutes of pouring over the entire museum before I realized "Map" was just the name of the map room.....anyways great game, 5/5, I learned a lot of things I didn't know, and this game was not offensive at all thank goodness lol!!!
Hey pyay, the minute of silence is intentonal, but thanks for bringing these bugs to our attention. We are about to ship a patch over the next two days and I'll see if I can include the spelling fix if it hadn't been caught yet =)
really good game :) im trans myself but still figuring out my gender so this is nice, it's very soothing and i love the music n all the colors and shapes!! controls were a bit wonky but it was a good experience <3 thank u for this game i love it alot
What a great, gentle introduction to some complex and emotional ideas~~ Great work! It’s amazing that you all were able to create this in only 36 hours!
Hey, thanks for the feedback. We are aware of the bug and have been working on a fix, but due to some unrelated circustances havnt been able to publish it yet. It should come within the next weeks thought.
bugs in the new version - the pronoun door Xe seems to be surrounded by an invisible wall, same for the door no pronoun in that barrier there is a tiny crack left of the door right by the wall (may have to do with the clipping issue going through (opening?) doors in quick succession), seems like it's one way only though; the door itself works normal but the wall keeps you from further exploration to reproduce start the game go through the trans room to the staircase (you may walk around on the upper levels reading stuff in the other rooms), then jump down the staircase, try the doors
Thanks for putting the clarification into the void room.
I really love this game, but I did encounter a glitch where, while walking through one of the pronoun doors repeatedly, back and forth, and ended up falling out of the world
Besides that, the "Xe" door seems to be somewhat buggy; It didn't let me enter it from the front, but when I tried to enter from the side, I effectively got stuck inside the door, only being able to walk back and forth and trigger the dialogue
Thanks for the great feedback and the bug report. We have a patch in the works that will hopefully fix the glitches/bugs in the pronoun room, but it will take another week or so due to a few of us being on vacation currently =)
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Comments
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All these different manifestations of individuality/individualism are so beautiful. I hope we will succeed in defending the liberal rights and freedoms for the generations to come.
Speaking of beautiful. You've hit the Antichamber look so well!
male if it letted me did it
Male,if it would me do it.Sorry just hate when people use grammar the wrong way.
nah, dont worry, im not a native english speaker
Sorry,and I messed up too,but sorry didn't know.
Have a nice day!!!
Oh my gosh the voice started talking and I jumped and so did my heart bwahahaha
narrator jumpscare
I tried climbing the diagonal pillar from trans to passing and could almost get there if it wasn't for the fence I might have been able to. Was that intentional as some kind of metaphor?
It wasnt intended (it was originally possible to jump off, but we ended up disallowing that in order to optimise performence) but there have been quite a few interpretations of rooms we didnt originally consider.
I loved this game, i think it even helped me a bit with my own identity <3
Oh wow. Posts like this mean so much! Thank you for playing <3
This game made me feel really seen during what is an incredibly difficult time. I don't know how this collection of cubes made me so emotional, but it certainly did. Thanks for making this game.
Thank you for playing! Super glad the game made you feel seen =)
I like how it said male or female so I went through the pink door which i presume is for female. then there was a path with arrows and I ignored it and went the other way and it said trans which exactly me which I found hilarious.
Thank you for making this game! One of the developers commented on my YouTube playthrough already. Just thought I'd share it here as well. It had lovely use of color and design. The architecture is very clever at times.
Is there a masc room? I spent like an hour looking but couldn't find it
Hey AJ,
I'm sorry to say there is no masc room. We had to make a somewhat arbitrary cutoff somewhere what terms we'd include and which we wouldn't get to and we decided we wanted to make it clear by the composition of the collection that the list of covered terms was incomplete. We added the map in order to help players figure out what they have already found and what remains to be discovered.
Damn I went to the blue door in the beginning and thought that going to the pink door first would reveal a masc room
Haha, I fell off the world, I'm a nobody now xD.
Also, I loved the game, very informative and can be so helpful for a lot of people. Me, as a gender fluid person, found it very relaxing and like a way to understand me a bit more. And also I freaking love the non-Euclidian space games, it's really awesome and confusing.
Haha, do you remember where you fell off? We tried to block off/fix all the gaps where people could fall off, but some always seem to slip through.
I can relate, haha.
It was on the part of the 'CIS' sign. If you go around that same part over and over, the letters will go up and eventually disappear and that's where I fell of, at the end of the hallway.
Hope it's useful and you can fix it soon! Good luck!
Update: I've replayed it to test it out.
You can get there by entering the trans room, going a bit further to the stairs, just to make the first room to transform in the loop, and then go back to the cis hallway and go around it in the opposite direction of the arrow, a few times. Eventually the hallway will end in a wall and you can pass through it and fall forever.
If you go around enough on the direction of the arrow, you'll get the cis sign to disappear completely, but I didn't get to fall like in the other direction.
I haven't tested it with the rest of the rooms, I have homework to do xD, but I hope this is helpful.
Thanks for the details, will have a look at it =)
Me, someone who's agender/doesn't have gender: ***CONFUSED SCREAMING**
Did you find the void room?
Oh I actually did :D
Though it took me a while
<3
This game made me incredibly euphoric. I've always known I'm a trans man, but this game helped me explore my identity more. The pronoun doors were so fun, I think I've found some new ones! Absolutely love this game.
Thank you so much! Reading comments like this is one of the most rewarding parts of this whole gamedev thing =)
Thank you
the moment of joy when you find yourself (literally :D)
Tech wise this is basically Antichamber. How did you pull that off in 36 hours?
I do notice some visual glitches so portals aren't actually seamless in the game world - however you still have a proper portal renderer in there. Unity comes with the feature now, or did you manage to build that in that little time?
Certainly looks impressive.
Actually: just checked the code - it seems like Unity has Camera objects that do the heavy part of the work. Still quite an achievement to get this in 36 hours. Well done!
There are a couple of different mechanics we use for the effects.
For one we spawn and despawn copies of each room in relative positions to the room the player is currently in based on triggers set in this room. This allows us to have rooms that would intersect with each other or repeat endlessly.
The portals work by placing a second camera in the same relative position to the "portal exit" that the player has to the "portal entrence", rendering it to a render texture and then use a custom shader to istead of cropping it onto the portal plane cutting out the part of the fullscreen texture that intersects with the portalplane.
The main problem with portals is that having multiple of them active at any given time can really drag down the performence so its key to deactivate them whenever they are not actually rendering anythign and avoid "portal loops".
For the queer room tunnell we project the player position onto a single axis and then rotate the room and its neighbours depending on a 180° Lerp with the projected player position as progress value.
The basic concepts arn't that hard to impliment in a limited amount of time (although the code is quite a bit messier than it needed to be due to the time constraints). It's the setting and testing of triggerboxes, anchorpoints etc. that takes most time. It should also be said that some of the rooms currently in the game were not present in the original jam release, but added later on.
Ah, you can spawn/despawn entire rooms in Unity. That of course helps and also allows some things to be done easier than the original Antichamber way (having native portals and enabling/disabling them at will).
Was rather curious as I was the one implementing the portal mechanics into DarkPlaces Quake engine + Xonotic and it was a lot harder there - well, none of these primitives were there though (except some existing engine code for rendering a scene in the same map to a texture which was used for water reflections). E.g. dynamically spawning entire rooms including objects is not possible even today, and the hacks that would allow sort of similar things are extremely slow as they would lose precomputed visibility information.
How I did it in the combination of DP + Xonotic was twofold: in DP I just provided "cameras" where game code can set the view origin of the camera, and in Xonotic I made all the other primitives (e.g. collision) aware of the portals.
In my game AAAAXY (which is 2D and thus I had no even remotely portal-capable engines available, but created my own) I went with a different way, to ensure portals have no glitches whatsoever; that way is however rather incompatible with multiplayer and thus I cannot generally recommend it. I basically decided to support portals in the tile loader itself and nowhere else, meaning everything else, including player movement, distance computations, tracing etc. work precisely the same whether portals are in the way or not. This approach may be applicable to 3D games as well, although as you describe portal tech in 3D is not particularly hard anyway, ESPECIALLY if given the primitives "Camera" and "copying rooms together" (in fact, with just copying rooms together and without cameras, you could already do portals the AAAAXY way and it will all be one render pass, although it may be slow to add/remove room parts at runtime and doing it like that everywhere also puts some annoying constraints).
While doing this, I also had the issue that third person portals are even more broken in general, as the typical way done in 3D engines only works for a first person view. To some extent this can be worked around, of course. What I ended up doing was introducing the same visibility mechanism as you know it from 3D games but applied to 2D - so anything the player cannot see is just black. Personally I got the idea from Among Us, but I must highlight https://alxwest.itch.io/kitakombs which discovered and released this tech independently on Itch before I finished my game.
There are a few ways to spawn/despawn full rooms in Unity. Given that this was a jam originally we took the simply road and made them all into prefabs, provided each room with a reference to each prefab that could spawn from it and the appropriate anchor points. The Trigger zones then call on the current Room to spawn/despawn them accordingly.
Similar things can be done by treating rooms as seperate scenes and spawnnign them additively, but this does not work as neatly with having several copies of them and a few other thigns we do.
I'm allways happy to see different solutions for implementing non-eucledian levels. Will take a look at the ones you mentioned for sure =)
Using similar mechanics in 2D is something I've always wanted to do but havn't gotten around to yet. I think this could be especially fun for sidescrollers, where having branching paths (other than having a bunch of background doors) can be a challenge.
- radow
BTW I think I forgot to mention - there is one way to do non-euclidean geometry in a 2D sidescroller without the visibility shadows that I did: if an entire screenful matches on the two ends of the portal, i.e. if overlaps are one screen away from the respective portal from which they are entered, then this can be done by transparently teleporting, as nothing on the screen would change during this.
A game that does this technique is none other than the original Super Mario Bros. in some of the castle levels (those where going a wrong path transparently brings you back to the start of the level). However in there the teleporting was not entirely transparent - they didn't clone some firebars to the destination side of the portal. This would have had an easy fix, of course; however due to how spawning works, it might have been tricky to put the "new" firebars in the same angle as the "old" ones, so this may be why they didn't.
ngl I was about to cry
it gave me literal shivers
Am i gonna cry lmao
yk as someone thats working towards discovering who they truly are this was great to have and i over all love it great job :>
Its great! It provides tons of information for people who aren't aware, or people who are questioning, great job! <3
pov: you just figured out your gender/sexuality and now your questioning yourself again lol
The use of environmental story-telling is wonderful. The display and shape of each room creates the atmosphere of a museum, and this makes sense as each room contains a new concept to do with gender and identity. This actually reminds me of an in-person sexuality museum I visited in Glasgow; It was so validating and comforting seeing our community presented in a space made for the retention of historically important knowledge. The Queer community has lost so much of our history throughout time because of the lack of acceptance within the general public. Even when we have been documented in popular history it's been from an outsider point of view. Sometimes it feels we have been made a spectacle, not something to be understood but instead observed. To hear us tell our own stories and for them to be kept in a museum and seen as experiences worthy of sharing and protecting is unlike anything I've ever seen, and here I see it again in this game. Games can create an interactive narrative, providing a space for queer stories and experiences to survive, be shared and retold. Making a queer game and displaying it is revolutionary, because it demonstrates how we will never be lost to history again. This game is important, thank you for making it.
I even sent it to a friend who was questioning their own identity and it helped them feel so much better.
five stars
Thank you for sharing your experience with the game. It's incredibly heartworming to hear that our game is able to evoke such reactions.
Also: The museum in glasgow you discribe sounds amazing and now we all wanna go there =]
<3
So this ain't the game's fault, just thought this was kinda funny. When I got to the "map" area, I saw there was a square called "Map"....well, I misunderstood this and thought it meant "MAPS" like the pedophiles. So it boggled my mind that this would be included here (Like, I was legit wondering wtf it would say about MAPS), so I had to go find it...Took me 10 minutes of pouring over the entire museum before I realized "Map" was just the name of the map room.....anyways great game, 5/5, I learned a lot of things I didn't know, and this game was not offensive at all thank goodness lol!!!
Loved it! Its a nice game and loveful! :D
Very nice game, love it
PD report: in euphoria, its written somtimes called, without the e, its a small thing but i thought it would be helpful :)
ah, and i dont know if its a bug, but music doesnt loop very well, it's like there's a minute of silence between the music loops
Hey pyay,
the minute of silence is intentonal, but thanks for bringing these bugs to our attention. We are about to ship a patch over the next two days and I'll see if I can include the spelling fix if it hadn't been caught yet =)
really good game :) im trans myself but still figuring out my gender so this is nice, it's very soothing and i love the music n all the colors and shapes!! controls were a bit wonky but it was a good experience <3 thank u for this game i love it alot
What a great, gentle introduction to some complex and emotional ideas~~ Great work! It’s amazing that you all were able to create this in only 36 hours!
Informative and fun with a very nice ending. It's a great game!
Lovely game! I had a ton of fun with it. :) The genderfluid room was nice.
simply amazing, loved super informative, the experience was very good.
pretty cool game! is there a sexual orientation one like this also?
im stuck in the doorway of no pronouns cannot leave
Hey, thanks for the feedback. We are aware of the bug and have been working on a fix, but due to some unrelated circustances havnt been able to publish it yet. It should come within the next weeks thought.
bugs in the new version
- the pronoun door Xe seems to be surrounded by an invisible wall, same for the door no pronoun
in that barrier there is a tiny crack left of the door right by the wall (may have to do with the clipping issue going through (opening?) doors in quick succession), seems like it's one way only though; the door itself works normal but the wall keeps you from further exploration
to reproduce start the game go through the trans room to the staircase (you may walk around on the upper levels reading stuff in the other rooms), then jump down the staircase, try the doors
Thanks for putting the clarification into the void room.
This was so well done! Love the antichamber vibes
this game is really informative! i honestly love the overall design, thank you for making it!
This game made me feel the same confusion of attempting to figure out my own gender. 10/10
It was such lovely game even though I struggle to learn about other genders it still was amazing and eye-opening
Thank you!!
This game made me feel emotional. For sure the best browser game I've ever played.
I really love this game, but I did encounter a glitch where, while walking through one of the pronoun doors repeatedly, back and forth, and ended up falling out of the world
Besides that, the "Xe" door seems to be somewhat buggy; It didn't let me enter it from the front, but when I tried to enter from the side, I effectively got stuck inside the door, only being able to walk back and forth and trigger the dialogue
Thanks for the great feedback and the bug report. We have a patch in the works that will hopefully fix the glitches/bugs in the pronoun room, but it will take another week or so due to a few of us being on vacation currently =)