Play dream
Geometric Dreams's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #5 | 4.827 | 4.827 |
| Overall | #18 | 4.346 | 4.346 |
| Originality | #28 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Gameplay | #102 | 3.712 | 3.712 |
Ranked from 52 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Love the minimalist aesthetic and design. Was really interesting navigating the space. My only complaint is the performance was real rough at times.
What do you like about your game?
I really like how the movement physics turned out, the cube-sphere blending feels great!
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Comments
yes.
this game is absolutely beautiful! you've really captured the dream-like lucid atmosphere from the color choices to the shining rays of light beaming down towards the ground, almost painting it in the same white hues allowing the foreground to blend in with the background, it looks really cool! speaking of blending, the ray-marching mesh blending affect also looks astoundingly great, was mesmerized when i first saw it in action after you press play for the first time (went to go restart the game again just to see it once more xd)! its mesmerizing to watch the object melt into the surface as you travel further beyond your initial containment, feels like you're sinking deeper and deeper into the recesses of your "geometric" dream to reach your inner core (thus leading to more abstract inner monologue), with each new area levied with obstacles to keep you in a space "comfort" and away from what you might instinctively be looking. very dream-like indeed, really like it! the use of audio also does an incredible job at shaping the atmosphere to where it needs to be: idyllic and ephemeral. really loved vibing with music here while platforming!
i loved the gradual introduction of gameplay elements in the game! the dialogue hints helped a lot in guiding players on what they are capable of doing now while also aiding in adding to that dream-like introspective ambience you got going on! i like the mechanical relationship between the sphere and the cube, where the sphere helps the player climb and navigate through obstacles easier while the cube helps stop momentum in a sort of unconventional way due to its geometry. that duality helped add flavor to the platforming and made it a fun challenge to go through! i think i reached the end from what i saw in the comments (not sure if there was another objective based on the text that pops up)?
overall, really cool and visually stunning game! i had a lot of fun with this one! great work!
thanks for all the feedback and kind words, I really appreciate it! I love that you restarted the game to see the beginning again, that’s pretty funny, I’m glad you enjoyed it. and yeah, you reached the end — I know it’s vague, I ran out of time to make a proper ending.
One thing I would like to say about is "Simplism".
The gameplay really fit together really well, the mood, lighting, even the character... All are being connected together, merging with the environment. Simple but complex...
The physic and visual calculation is optimized base on the how the game performed that smooth. The uniqueness lighting system with the ambient lighting affect the shadow, the light shaft and the skybox. Post - processing also did some magic here.
As my suggestion for the story progression, if someone ever ask me if this game is missing anything, I would say it is the ending, i mean the TRUTH ending like where the cube will go? Will it become what it is dream of and "fly high" or it will be stuck in a loop forever? This is what I want to know.
Lastly, I want to say thank you for let me play this.
in truth, the rendering is not very optimized, but I’m glad it ran smoothly for you. I’ll definitely work on improving the ending, thanks for the feedback!
What a beautiful little experience!
Super cool concept and really solid execution! It's impressive how you managed to get all the physics working without feeling janky at all (I had ~60 fps the whole time, which probably helped). I would have loved to see more of the object blending incorporated into the gameplay somehow, though I'm sure you had plenty of ideas that you didn't have time to implement.
thanks! I spent so much time tweaking those physics lol. and yeah, I wanted to do more gameplay mechanics, but I ran out of time like you guessed.
That felt like a really nice, kind of transcendant experience. The text at the beginning of each level set a nice thoughtful mood and helped hint at the mechanics (fly away -> you can double jump to escape). Watching the cube morph and meld into the floor was pretty mesmerizing to watch -- honestly, the whole artstyle was really beautiful and original. I don't think I've ever seen or played something like this before. Amazing job!
ooh it's beautiful, I love the mood visuals and audio set
didn't manage to finish the game (got stuck on the tall spiral level lol) but it was really nice!
thanks! well, you reached the last level, so you’ve basically seen it all. it was meant as an optional final challenge, but I realize it was a bit too rough.
This is visually stunning. Well done!
I wonder if there is a way to fake the blending effects to achieve a similar result while less resource-intensive
thanks!
it’s an interesting proposition. the cube-sphere transition could be achieved with a basic vertex-animation, though that’s the easy part. the blending between the cube-sphere and the ground/world would be much trickier, but I have some ideas around it.
the most reasonable alternative is probably marching cubes, which would allow for regular mesh-based rendering. it shouldn’t be too expensive to recalculate the mesh every frame if the effect area is small, and the mesh resolution could be adjusted for quality/performance.
another alternative might be some fancy vertex shader stuff, though I have no idea if that’s even feasible.
also, a hybrid approach might be viable — render everything with normal meshes, then do raymarching only in a small area around the player. the main bottleneck with raymarching is the amount of fragments, so this would greatly boost performance. it would require a lot of tuning to make sure it looks cohesive, though.
and finally, I want to mention that there’s a lot of room for optimizations when it comes to how I did raymarching. this was my first time experimenting with it, so it’s really amateurish. and I barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with raymarching… there’s a lot more potential here.
I loved the look and unique style of this game, really interesting concept and shader ideas (especially appreciate the details, such as the meta-ball style blending and unique way of doing the shadowing).
I did enjoy the story & gameplay too, however - up to a point. I felt you managed to get a lot of character out of the geometry shapes, but some of the level design especially in later levels was edging on the side of frustrating rather than fun. I think progress respawn points will help a lot there, instead of having to redo the whole thing if you fall.
Absolutely stunning game, amazing job!
(P.S. it ran fine for me, 50-60fps)
thank you!
the last level turned out to be a miss for many. it was meant as an optional final challenge, but the game doesn’t communicate that very well. I’ll definitely do something about it in a post-jam update, to make it less frustrating.
Visually stunning game - simple, and fun! Great work.
This level was the furthest I managed to get lol
Tbh, you should take my feedback on this game with a grain of salt since it ran terribly for me even on the lowest of settings even with shadows off lol ( average fps was like 13 ).
I have the most potato of potato laptops out there, although thanks to this game, it's a grilled potato now kek.
First off, awesome presentation. I won't speak like I understand how you achieved this sort of geometric abberation lol , but it's an amazing effect. And even apart from that, the general colour tones and lighting were honestly superb. Minimalism done right.
It was pretty cool to see the cube become a sphere overtime until it finally became one. Although I thought it was cool how it would go back to being a square to stop itself so to speak lol.
Sound in general was also great and definitely helped setting the ethereal vibe you were probably going for, let it be the music or sfx.
Unfortunately though, the platforming was a little too annoying to pull off sometimes ( Or more specifically, when it required precise inputs ). Now again, this might be because the game ran poorly on my system, so take it with a grain of salt, but it was definitely my biggest problem with the game. And turning shadows off wasn't really an option because the entire level would go dark and I couldn't see anything
That said, the actual level design and story being told was cool. I like how you implied that you have a double jump with the level where you tell a player to " fly away " lol. Although I kinda wish something similar was done in the level in the above screenshot since I didn't know that you could triple jump until I kept spamming jump lol.
I realise it probably took a really long time to get all of this together, so while I do kinda wish that there were more mechanics in place that made use of the geometric abberation effect, I honestly can't deny the quality of what you've made none the less. ( Although if there is more to the game after where I reached that does do this, then I take this back lol )
Either way, great job on this overall
thanks for playing, and for all the feedback!
judging from that screenshot, you ran it at 720p with native 100 % resolution scale. I think you could have reached 30+ fps with bilinear 25 % resolution scale, but I realize that I made that option a bit … obscure. this was my first time experimenting with raymarching, so there’s definitely room for performance improvements. I’ve figured out a few optimizations since the jam ended, and I hope to eventually make it run at 60 fps on your grilled potato!
anyway, you reached the final level. there’s a tiny little “reward” if you reach the top, but you’ve pretty much seen it all already. about the triple-jump, it’s very subtly implied by how you stay a sphere until all jumps are used. also, that level is beatable by just double-jumping, so the triple-jump was mostly meant as a secret to discover. that said, I’m definitely tweaking that level to make it less punishing — it was made in an adrenaline rush 1 hour before the deadline so I’m sorry about that lol.
I had a lot of ideas about more mechanics I wanted to implement, I just didn’t have enough time. I plan to expand the game in a post-jam update. I’m also working on reducing how precise you have to be in general. thanks again!
i enjoyed this very much:)
raymarching?!?!????!?!!?!??!!
nice, very underrated technique
Cool concept, and amazing graphics. I liked the blending/neomorphism effect, although it blows my mind and I really don't know how you've implemented it. The game was a bit too laggy for my set-up tho, so I couldn't finish the last level. But I really liked the artistic approach of the game.
thanks!
not that you asked, but I feel compelled to answer: the blending effect is achieved with a raymarched smooth minimum between shapes. if you’re curious about the implementation details, I can recommend this article by Inigo Quilez.
regarding performance, there’s a handful of graphics settings in the game to help with this — but even at the lowest settings, the game won’t run smoothly on all hardware. I didn’t have much time to optimize the raymarching during the jam, but I’m working on it now.
Wow, this is really cool! The game loads my video card 100%, but I still like it.
How did you implement raymarching in godot, with its meager rendering options? Are the shadows made using raymarching too, or are you using standard shadow maps?
thanks!
I’m not sure what you mean about Godot’s “meager rendering options”, I don’t see any limits. I wrote a custom raymarching shader (see link below for resources), and slapped it on a quad in front of the camera (super hacky, I know). and yes, the shadows are raymarched too! the only things that are not raymarched: text, menus, screen fade effect, and skybox (the raymarching shader distance-fades alpha to reveal a standard ProceduralSkyMaterial).
if you want details about how to implement a raymarching shader, I suggest Inigo Quilez’s articles — it’s a real treasure trove!
Thanks, yeah, by "meager rendering options" I just meant that godot doesn't provide a good way to do a custom post effect or custom rendering pass. Even the official documentation suggests using fullscreen quad for that, while it is still MeshInstance3D and has coordinates, AABB and is affected by environment
oh I see, that’s fair. thanks for the link about fullscreen quad, that seems very useful to get my raymarching shader working in the editor. it’s pretty funny that this hacky solution is in the docs!
this made me feel things.
surprisingly deep, the visual are absolutely stunning and the platforming feels unique. very pretentious, very good.
this is what I love to see, graphics techniques mainly
very enjoyable beautiful tech demo. Platforming is very smooth and the level design immediately telegraphs what you should be doing, with some cool tech I dont think Ive ever really seen (melting cubes).
Theres some good abstract subtext to this game as well which I really enjoy, fits the minimal shape elements pretty well.
Watched the guy below me play it on stream, so true please make more.
Please make more I didn't have enough
hmm ok, you convinced me
Yes!!!
Visuals and colors are so good. I liked the cube starting to melt into the floor when getting closer to the end. I wished it was longer. It feels like a mixture of Journey, Manifold Garden and early levels of human fall flat :D Good job on atmosphere and visuals! It needs more gameplay mechanics and levels tho.
thanks! I really wanted to expand on the gameplay and make more levels, but I didn’t have enough time. it seems like a common theme with jam games, many of them end too soon — yours too, I wish it was longer!
Yeah it sure happens a lot in game jams. I might code it smarter and release it on google playstore ( I need to publish something to not lose my dev account :D)