A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet

(messenger.abeto.co)

793 points | by thecupisblue 9 hours ago ago

151 comments

  • Brainfood 3 minutes ago

    @thecupisblue. Amazing work. Logged in just to tell you this. This has just given me goose bumps and made me excited about the web again. I’ve been struggling to find my groove in the dev world post AI and have been digging back into AR and WebXR just for the fun of it. Thank you for the game and more importantly the renewed inspiration to make something cool!

  • firefoxd 8 hours ago

    The font? The art style? The fluidity on a mobile device? It's fantastic.

    I wasn't able to deliver packages but I was too mesmerized to be mad about that. Beautiful game. Kudos.

    Edit: I did figure it out and completed all the deliveries. So many potential. It reminds me a bit of Sky by thatgamecompany

    Edit 2: for the author, I noticed several players approached me and tried to communicate. Please explore games like Journey (thatgamecompany) to see different ways people communicate without chatting. People can help each other, veterans can guide newbies all without using words. Every time I met a player in the game back in the days, they sent me a heartfelt message.

    • bitbasher 8 minutes ago

      I had a great time jumping around and some other runners joined me and I realized I wasn't the only one playing. We began to communicate via jumping.

    • shayway 7 hours ago

      It really is lovely. I had the same thought about refining interactions a bit -- I would also suggest Meadow by Might & Delight as an example of nonverbal communication done well.

    • maplethorpe an hour ago

      You can communicate by sending emojis with the menu in the bottom right.

      • araes an hour ago

        If you have a keyboard, then upper keys 1-2...9-0 do all the emojis as hotkeys. Ex, 9 does the takeout food, which is probably meant to be "busy, eating" or something similar.

    • Levitating 2 hours ago

      I think it's the curvature of the world that's making it run so well on mobile. There's never to much models on-screen to draw.

    • Blahah 3 hours ago

      The game is wonderful and I'm so glad it doesn't have chat! My 9yo niece and I played it through side by side and if it had chat or consistent remote player presence that wouldn't have been appropriate.

      • firefoxd 3 hours ago

        That's why I suggested other means of communication other than chat.

        • Blahah an hour ago

          Absolutely - I love those. I wonder if there are any other simple web games like this that run on mobile with more nuanced interplayer comms as you suggest.

        • web007 2 hours ago

          There's a poop symbol on the bottom right, click it to see ways to communicate.

          I was surprised to learn the random messengers are other humans!

    • kaismh 8 hours ago

      You need to click on npc to start conversation, one of them is office worker, he will give you a delivery

    • logicallee 8 hours ago

      I played for a few minutes. I wasn't able to deliver packages either.

      • riggsdk 8 hours ago

        The game doesn't really explain that too well. You have to go find the packages first before you can deliver it. For example the old lady asks you to deliver an offering at a temple.

    • DenisDolya 8 hours ago

      I also didn't really understand how to do it, but I liked the game, it's so beautiful and peaceful, it's a shame there's no chat and you have to speak through emojis.

      • red_trumpet 8 hours ago

        Some people have an arrow on top of their head, and when you approach them there is a dialog balloon with "...". If you click on them they give you a task.

  • pkdpic an hour ago

    This is like a masterclass in game design, mobile UI, wasm, character design, game dialogue and interactive paychogeography. I'm gonna show this to my kid's computer club next week. Really fantastic, bravo. Is this seriously a solo developer project??

    If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..

  • Jotalea 4 hours ago

    I spent more time enjoying the graphics and style than actually playing. it runs so well on a mobile device, I've never seen something like this.

    as for the game itself, I couldn't understand how to deliver the messages.

    • keanebean86 2 hours ago

      I have a cheap android phone that's 4 years old. This game is still playable. Very impressive!

    • HardwareLust 3 hours ago

      Thank you, I thought it was just me .

    • mountainriver 2 hours ago

      Reminds me of Jet Set Radio

  • geuis 3 hours ago

    Love all of it except for the camera controls on iOS. Not sure how you could improve them but they need some work. Camera gets too close to the character a lot. Might consider two touch controls that separate movement direction and camera position.

    • kouru225 a minute ago

      Too sensitive on the turning

    • xixixao 2 hours ago

      Agreed. Same for movement. It’s a little too hard to run straight sometimes.

  • gettingoverit 6 hours ago

    Loved the artstyle, but controls... uhh... let's say they were on par with a bad PC port of Sonic Adventure. I can barely control where I'm going, because the camera just rotates randomly. Something I'll never miss from the old days.

    • bob1029 5 hours ago

      The controls are the only gripe I have with this amazing work.

      If I was in Unity, I would address this issue by manually placing a bunch of virtual cameras in the world and using cinemachine to blend between them. The size of this world is small enough to justify manual placement and configuration of each. You could also just focus on the complex areas and let the default follow cam handle the rest.

    • thaumasiotes 5 hours ago

      This really wants to be controlled by twin thumbsticks.

      • lavela 3 hours ago

        ..or mouse for camera.

        But I kind of understand it. I did a somehow similar project before and for people who are not trained in video game style controls it is quite hard to get used to them ad-hoc.

        Assuming this project is at least partially aimed at art directors, project leads and such aka people who aren't necessarily gamers, detached movement/camera controls are a bit risky.

        • araes an hour ago

          The mouse look was actually something I was kind of wanting wandering around.

          There were a lot of cool scenic locations, that almost beg for the ability to just stand somewhere and look around, yet you can't really look down or up very conveniently.

          Also, walking locations where you might fall, be kind of nice to be able to look at where you're aiming at. Minor nit mostly, just fit the explore a scenic island theme.

  • tetris11 4 hours ago

    Woah, is this the same author as

    https://summer-afternoon.vlucendo.com

    ?

    • geuis 3 hours ago

      Love the beach guy makes an appearance in both.

    • V__ 3 hours ago

      I remember that. What a talent.

    • 5- 4 hours ago

      well spotted! seems to be the case: https://x.com/vlucendo/status/1971219342231732516

      • tetris11 4 hours ago

        I noticed the movement UI style was the same

    • KevinMS 3 hours ago

      controlling movement is much easier. Something is wrong with the movement in the OP game, at least on a browers

      • Retr0id 2 hours ago

        Feels about the same to me, I think the map is just more open on this one so the camera is less likely to be pointed somewhere annoying.

    • Rygian 4 hours ago

      The alien sunbathing at the beach is a nice wink.

  • reactordev 7 hours ago

    I think people are confused that they have to deliver packages they already possess. Instead the instructions should read…

    “Explore and Make Deliveries”

  • seabass 8 hours ago

    Really beautiful! Love the artwork and the fact that this runs so well in the browser. Was surprised to realize it was multiplayer!

  • Biganon 3 hours ago

    This is the loveliest thing I've ever seen on the web. The feeling of being immediately immersed in a universe. A work of art.

  • nclgrt 33 minutes ago

    Gorgeous. Would love to know how they managed to create a reliably good-looking outline post processing shader with notches (the sketched look).

  • softfalcon 5 hours ago

    Am sitting at a game jam right now and took a break to browse HN. Found this and started playing for a bit. Now everyone is asking about it, this is a really polished and fun WebGL game. Amazing!

  • hei-lima an hour ago

    Amazing! I've never seen a game with this artstyle, really, really classy!

  • latexr 3 hours ago

    The camera, controls, and difficult to discern invisible walls were frustrating to the point I had to just quit the game, even after completing over half of the deliveries. On Safari on macOS there is also a glitch where the character’s clothes keep changing, and I can’t see any other players there (it was only when I tried it on iOS that I realised this is Journey-like).

    But the game is beautiful and peaceful and I’m still glad I got to experience it. I’ll definitely share it with some friends. Thank you for making it.

  • sram1337 6 hours ago

    I appreciate what seems like an attempt to make a "smart camera" that gets out of the way of the player and unburdens them from having to control both a player and the perspective of the camera. That burden, of controlling two entities (player and camera) is large for people who are unused to playing video games.

    Was this dynamic on your radar when building the game and camera system? Would love to hear your thoughts.

    • laurentlb 6 hours ago

      I'd rather have the choice to control the camera (the "smart" camera could be used only if I don't control it), because it didn't work well for me.

      Nice game otherwise.

    • cubefox 2 hours ago

      Modern camera systems are often smart in this way. Zelda Ocarina of Time on the N64 was one of the first (if not the first) that got "out of the way" by itself.

  • noufalibrahim 7 hours ago

    It could use a tutorial but this is probably the first time that I didn't care about the actual aim of the game because of how beautifully it looks and sounds. I could just run around in your little world forever and feel nice. It's really well done.

  • seabass 8 hours ago

    I'm curious how you build something like this. I see file types in the network tab which, as a web dev, I've never worked with before. ktx2 and drc extensions, for example. I'm also seeing some wasm and threejs. Is there an engine that outputs these things or is it more of a manual process to bring everything together?

    • skocznymroczny 7 hours ago

      ktx is Khronos Texture a format for storing compressed textures (=image data) so that they can be uploaded to GPU memory without decompressing step inbetween

      drc is Draco Compression, it's a library from Google to compress mesh data

      • jsheard 6 hours ago

        KTX can just store compressed GPU textures as-is, but in this case they're using the Basis Universal codec which is a bit more involved. Basis stores textures in a super-compressed form, which is decompressed at runtime to produce a less compressed (but still compressed!) format that the GPU can work with. The advantage is that it's smaller over the wire and one source file can decompress to several different GPU formats depending on what the users hardware supports.

    • paxys 7 hours ago

      ktx2 = textures

      drc = 3d shapes (I think)

      ogg = audio

      All of these would normally be bundled in the game installer, but are sent down piece by piece over the network in this case.

      Then there's some wasm and js for the game's business logic. The browser has WebGL APIs that enable running all of this.

      I'm assuming they used a library or engine like Unity, Godot or Three.js that supports WebGL as an execution target.

      • bdcp 2 hours ago

        The NPC at the top of the building sais it's three.js

      • monsieurbanana 5 hours ago

        Definitely Three.js or at least something similarly low-level. I doubt you can get this kind of performance with Godot or Unity on the web.

    • fatbird 7 hours ago

      Having done some non-trivial things with threejs, I'd guess it's basically like this: 3JS is the rendering engine (taking advantage of WebGL); game logic is in Javascript; ktx2 is an OpenGL container holding the world data and other meshes; from looking at the filenames, WASM bits are used for loading the ktx2 data (draco_decoder.wasm). ogg files are for sound. The multiple worker files imply that the app is using web workers to run the WASM performantly to load the world.

    • holoduke 8 hours ago

      Threejs is like the jQuery for building 3d stuff. But it's not a platform like Unity or Unreal engine. But it doesn't look overly complicated.

  • rdrd 3 hours ago

    Beautiful. You can just tell when things are made with the core premise of how they wanted someone to FEEL playing it. Not some lore, not some "cool" gameplay ideas they had, not some fancy gfx concept they'd prototyped. It just feels different when you know it's been approached from a completely emotional perspective.

  • SamBam 4 hours ago

    Beautiful, as others have said.

    The one thing that transported me out of the game was the arbitrary blocking around the ocean / the end of the stream. (I assume those go to the same place, from different sides.)

    It seems on such a tiny world the water should never be more than waist deep, so why not just let us explore the whole thing. I didn't quite feel like I got to go all the way around the tiny world, and being fenced by an invisible barrier broke the fourth wall.

  • npteljes 6 hours ago

    Also visit their main site: https://abeto.co/ . The animation is mind-blowing.

    • urbandw311er 3 hours ago

      It's not obvious how to access any content on that page? The animation is cool though.

  • thinkingtoilet 11 minutes ago

    This is beautiful. Congrats.

  • c0balt 7 hours ago

    Awesome game, the graphics especially were nicely made. The cel shading (iirc) went well with the art style.

    Played through all missions and at the end had enough of the concept but appreciated the AOD. Especially the little bits of the environment, like the sleeping fox in the forest, were nice.

  • lsaferite an hour ago

    Was having fun. Completed all but the scientist objective as I couldn't find the last person. I found what looked to be a hidden location and as the person there said "Hello" it crashed the page. oof.

    • lsaferite an hour ago

      Happy to find out it remembered my progress. And I found the final delivery and completed the game. And yes, I'm sure the girl on the roof is a 'hidden' thing. She talks about three.js, game development, and art.

  • Skullfurious 3 hours ago

    Pretty damn cool experience. Definitely the most polished browser game I've tried. The limited scope really makes it fantastic and since it's such a small vertical slice the world feels very full of detail. The art style is fantastic as well.

  • animal_spirits an hour ago

    Very fun! And multiplayer too! Had some fun spamming emojis at other people :)

  • ivraatiems 6 hours ago

    This is absolutely adorable. I love the art style and the vibe. I love the tiny planet concept. Great work.

  • Geste 42 minutes ago

    This should have been a steam game. I played worse games there !

    • bob1029 30 minutes ago

      It still can be. This is a really good use case for electron. Steam doesn't care what kind of program it's launching.

  • tyleo 8 hours ago

    Agreed with everything said here about the beauty. I found the camera controls pretty clumsy though. I played in portrait, landscape probably would work better.

    • doophus 7 hours ago

      Yeah the camera's horrible. I found myself snaking left and right just trying to walk in a straight line.

      • imp0cat 4 hours ago

        Isn't this how camera in these games always used to work? You have to nudge your character to control it.

  • Liftyee 8 hours ago

    I love the art style, and it plays super smoothly on mobile! No tutorial, but the controls are so intuitive that I didn't need one (joystick touch control that's in almost every 3D mobile game). The sense of exploration and discovery is pretty fun.

  • umvi 4 hours ago

    Took me way to long too realize the other in-world delivery people were other players and not NPCs

  • onevarez 6 hours ago

    This is beautiful, kudos. I'm more than interested to read about the building process of this masterpiece.

  • upmostly 8 hours ago

    Absolutely stunning experience. The way the houses rolled over the hill as I walked. Incredible.

  • _pdp_ 8 hours ago

    It will be nice to know more about how this was made.

  • zghst an hour ago

    Completed the game, really awesome!!

    ––from San Francisco

  • ElijahLynn 3 hours ago

    has a lot of potential

    feedback after 5m

    * there should be a help section, all i could figure out is how to walk with up/left/down/right, and w/a/s/d. And the mouse. * I got nauseous after a bit, not sure if that is everyone or just me but I did have some bad nausea on a ride (teacups) at the local carnival/fair a few months ago, and it comes back every now and then. * the controls on desktop seem too sensitive. I had to eventually walk with W and then go left and right with the arrow keys, but even then it was too sensitive

    I left after 5m because of the nausea.

    I liked the music and peacefulness.

    • bilkow 3 hours ago

      Yeah, I also got motion sickness from the camera! I managed to complete as I really liked everything else but I'm still a bit nauseated.

    • la_oveja 3 hours ago

      camera control is non existant, you just go and game chooses what you see. let me control the camera please

  • nfbx 3 hours ago

    this is the most cute, beautiful shit i've seen all year. i love the fact that there are other players everywhere, since it's so convenient to dive into it via browser.

  • arkensaw 3 hours ago

    This is stunning, and I adore it. I had an idea to build a game set on a tiny planet but I never even started, and here you have created something that's awe-inspiring. keep it up!

  • Waterluvian 5 hours ago

    It took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize it was a font of readable text and not just random glyphs. I like the style of them.

  • thrance an hour ago

    I feel like a thief playing this for free. This is leagues better than most mobile "games", and actually online too!

  • nicexe 3 hours ago

    Decentraleyes extension on Firefox results in garbled text. Not sure why this happens. It is supposed to serve some common assets locally instead of requesting them over the network.

  • flockonus 7 hours ago

    Idea for letting the player move the camera alone: Top 1/3 portion of the screen is for camera movement alone, bottom 2/3 keep as is for player movement

  • saint11 2 hours ago

    Wow this looks amazing, but the camera made me very nauseous, I had to stop playing.

  • shae 6 hours ago

    When you finish the game you get the credits for who created it.

    There's also a threejs reference in a hard to reach area.

  • iib 4 hours ago

    How do you solve the second mission (the man that is hiding somewhere)? I've managed to find even the three.js mention, but nothing to start that one.

    • ryancanzo 4 hours ago

      He's in a cave near the forest. Turn right when you see the tree stump with the owl on it.

  • tomgag 7 hours ago

    Beautiful. Plays super smoothly on Firefox with NoScript, uBlock Origin and many other privacy extensions. But it lacks a player tutorial IMHO.

  • temporallobe 8 hours ago

    Love the design and concept of a tiny planet - reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy in that way. Definitely needs a tutorial or a short “How to Play” dialog or page.

    • seabass 8 hours ago

      On the other hand, I'm so glad it didn't. I enjoyed a few minutes of exploration before realizing what I was meant to be doing.

      • freehorse 7 hours ago

        Second this. Pretty much standard/intuitive controls, it was fun discovering what the game was about while captivated by the beautiful music and graphics.

  • JoeAltmaier 8 hours ago

    Beautiful. I got stuck in the corner behind Steve and game over - couldn't figure out how to navigate out, just kept triggering his dialog.

    • 6581 8 hours ago

      There's lots of spots where you can get stuck. Really needs a "reset position" option.

      • capitainenemo 8 hours ago

        Yeah, I had to end the game due to getting stuck between the fencing on the sea side and the chemical plant columns.

  • EcommerceFlow 3 hours ago

    Damn I'd love to play a Zelda game with that level of NPC detail and style.

    • ghurtado 3 hours ago

      You can, that game is Wind Waker

      Besides the visual style being very similar, there's an island in the game with about the same amount of NPCs, and they all have their own lives and many give you chores like this one.

  • mrlonglong 5 hours ago

    I got Hayao Miyazaki vibes about this game. Arigatou.

    • Keyframe 5 hours ago

      The boss reading the letter even looks like the guy.

    • computerdork 5 hours ago

      Me too:)

  • MrDisposable 5 hours ago

    This is fantastic.

    If I may ask, how did you do the environment models? Did you use textures and UV mapping? or just untextured models with a shader for the contours?

  • prameshbajra 3 hours ago

    Oh my god. This is amazing.

  • sheerun 6 hours ago

    I've played it through, very relaxing and esthetically pleasing

  • VagabundoP 4 hours ago

    Amazing.

    Its got a Zelda Wind Walker vibe that I love. It was fun just running around exploring.

  • iandanforth 6 hours ago

    Lots of fun! Just the right amount of gameplay.

  • lukebechtel 37 minutes ago

    well done!!

  • rsynnott 7 hours ago

    Kind of curious about the physics of this; the planet would obviously have to be ridiculously dense, but just how dense?

  • raincole 8 hours ago

    Stuck at loading screen for a few minutes. Hugged by HN?

    • capitainenemo 8 hours ago

      not likely to be your problem, but if you are using firefox resist fingerprinting, you need to whitelist most webgl apps that use large textures, since resist fingerprinting forces a standard texture size that is a bit on the small side. or maybe your machine is really old and you're hitting same problem for real. the game doesn't really detect errors.

  • sueszli 4 hours ago

    This is just wonderful

  • 5- an hour ago

    obligatory list of similar stuff.

    - alba: a wildlife adventure. more gameplay but somewhat similar controls/feel

    - a short hike. isometric but similar feel (thanks thrance)

    - the legend of zelda: the wind waker. haven't played, but mentioned in a few other comments

    - proteus. first person and more subtle gameplay

    anything else?

    • thrance an hour ago

      If we're going off vibes alone, I believe "A Short Hike" would be closer.

      • 5- an hour ago

        yes, thanks! i was unsure whether to include it because it looks quite different. but you are right, it has the similar exploratory vibe and is a great game.

  • zkmon 6 hours ago

    Oh, this is beautiful. I did a bit of WebGL and I wonder how they achieved fluidity like this.

  • isoprophlex 6 hours ago

    Absolutely stunning. Well done.

  • fallinditch 6 hours ago

    The spherical game environment works really well, would be great if it expand as you play more

  • lovegrenoble 3 hours ago

    So Impressive

  • jakubmazanec 3 hours ago

    Beautiful design, but uncontrollable and unplayable. Edit: on a phone I'm constantly bumping into walls.

    • Biganon 3 hours ago

      What? On desktop? Found it extremely easy to control...

  • ionwake 8 hours ago

    mind blown.

    Can I ask the author if AI helped him with this? Is it multiplayer too?

    I ask as I have been deving a webgl game for a few years

  • Arch-TK 7 hours ago

    Is this multiplayer? There are a lot of delivery people walking and jumping erratically.

    • npteljes 6 hours ago

      I'm not sure if they are real people. I started two sessions and I didn't see my other self, despite being in the same location. Also, both times, the starting place was the same. If that would be the case for everyone, there would be many people there who just start the game.

      • andrecarini 4 hours ago

        There's probably a bunch of different rooms/shards/servers and you get randomly allocated to one when starting

  • DJBunnies 8 hours ago

    Neat. Mini map would be cool.

  • chistev 3 hours ago

    Programming is magic

  • analog8374 3 hours ago

    Nice one

  • dangoodmanUT 6 hours ago

    haha this is cool

    immediately hit a bug where i had like 3 character skins at once though

  • hkon 3 hours ago

    Smooth, I enjoyed it a lot.

  • cdelsolar 3 hours ago

    i can't find the mountain temple :(

    • DanLol 30 minutes ago

      Me either XD I keep finding new places I haven't explored yet and getting distracted.

    • _qua 2 hours ago

      Neither can I. I feel stupid

  • andrewrn 7 hours ago

    What a delightful little game!

  • ta12653421 7 hours ago

    great effort, consistent styling, nice gameplay!

    huge success as side project and for the CV!

  • deadbabe 7 hours ago

    Is it truely a tiny planet or just shader effects?

    • npinsker an hour ago

      Probably shaders. The curvature's too extreme, and the way shadows move as you get close to them doesn't match physical reality.

      • deadbabe an hour ago

        Meh, that’s too bad, would have been awesome to see a planetoid engine.

  • unglaublich 8 hours ago

    This is amazing. Impressive.

  • bavaga 8 hours ago

    Beautiful piece of art

  • FpUser 5 hours ago

    Some really beautiful style and graphics. Never mind delivery I was just admiring the style.

  • jackblemming 6 hours ago

    Just chiming in with more positivity: was pleasantly surprised how fast this loaded and ran on mobile. Impressive work.

  • bdcp 2 hours ago

    I'm proud i found the UFO lmao

    • Levitating 2 hours ago

      I haven't found any UFOs but I did find an alien

      • bdcp 2 hours ago

        His ship is the opposite side of the water. It's a bit tricky to find :D

  • ptak 8 hours ago

    Beautiful!

  • zobzu 7 hours ago

    very well done