Spirit of Spring

You play as the Spirit of Spring trying to fulfill the task of bringing warmth and life back to a world locked in endless winter. The narrative is mainly told through the gameplay and environments. 

This game was made to experiment with what we are capable of in 3 weeks. The primary goal of this dev cycle was to capture a sense of scale and really make the player feel like they are in a world locked in endless deserts of snow and ice and I think we've achieved this (check out some of the screenshots).

Overall you'll be looking at 30-45 minutes of mostly linear gameplay. This would be best experienced in a single sitting but we do have a basic autosave function that should keep your progress once you get to the main play area. There's no real combat and puzzles/platforming are kept relatively simple. The main point of this game is to feel fluid and smooth when the player is flying around the world covering huge distances in a much shorter time than walking. Music plays an important role in really capturing the atmosphere.

We highly recommend using a game-pad. We've mapped keyboard controls as well but as the flying mechanic relies heavily on analogue input it's a little janky with a keyboard. If you don't have a controller here's the alternative keyboard mappings:

Jump: Controller (Y) - Keyboard (Space)

Fly: Controller (Right Trigger - analogue input) - Keyboard (Left-Click - maximum input)

Spirit Blast (used to deter evil spirits): Controller (X - when flying) - Keyboard (Space - when flying)

Camera Movement: Controller (Right Stick) - Keyboard (Right-click + move mouse)

Player Movement: Controller (Left Stick) - Keyboard (WASD)

Ascend (Enter spirit form): Controller (A) - Keyboard (E) 

Run: Controller (Left-Trigger) - Keyboard (Shift)

Requirements: You'll need a relatively beefy PC to run this game at a decent framerate. With more time we would have optimised it a lot more but in 3 weeks optimisation was at the bottom of our priority list. We had an artistic vision that we weren't willing to compromise - framerate be damned. We haven't tested this on a whole load of hardware so if you're not sure if you can run it then download it and have a go and it might run perfectly fine. Also, try lowering your display resolution in windows to get a better framerate if you need to -  we would've included some graphics settings but we've been on a tight schedule.

(Probably) Minimum Specs (1080p ~30fps):

CPU: Decent modern CPU (not super important since this game isn't script heavy)

GPU: GTX 1060 or AMD RX 570

RAM: 8GB

Imagine if 2 guys decided to make Journey in 3 weeks. Expect bugs and questionable optimisation. If you get stuck in a stationary sliding animation just press the Fly button (RT on controller/Left-Click on keyboard). Please be patient with the slightly janky platforming sections in the early part of the game. It's only a minor mechanic and the main mechanic of the game is unlocked when you progress to the second map.

So where are we gonna take this? Well, it depends largely on the Game Jam reception. If there's interest we'll probably take what we have, scrap a large chunk of it, and start over, this time doing things the right way and with more time to complete this game. We'll focus more heavily on narrative to really tell a unique story and try to extend the gameplay to match the length of something like Journey. There will be more time to spend on the environments and making the controls much more fluid so this could really have some potential.