Category: Announcements

A portion of a spherical maze projected onto the plane via stereographic projection.

Release: Stereographic Maze

tangledwebgames

I’m pleased to announce the release of this nifty little project, part math visualization, part puzzle game. You navigate a maze on the surface of a sphere, but the maze is being visualized on the screen via stereographic projection—a method for mapping the surface of a sphere onto a flat plane. Imagine a globe with a 2D plane bisecting it at the equator. If you draw a line at any downward angle from the north pole, it will pass through the surface of the sphere once, and through the equatorial plane once. Project each point on the sphere along that line onto the equatorial plane and you’ve got a stereographic projection. The southern hemisphere is projected upward into a circle in the center of the plane, and the northern hemisphere is projected outward to fill the entire remainder of the plane. The north pole itself is lost in the infinite distance.

In Stereographic Maze, our intrepid player (a dot) starts on the south pole (which is in the center of the screen), and must find its way to the north pole (marked by a modulating circle). Use the arrow keys to move along the surface of the sphere to eventually reach the north pole; or, more accurately, use the arrow keys to rotate the entire sphere to flip it upside down, getting the original north pole to be the south pole.

Play: https://tangledwebgames.itch.io/stereographic-maze
Source: https://github.com/l-e-webb/stereographic_maze

-Louis

New Project: Crown of Thorns

tangledwebgames

A side project I’m bringing to the front burner to try to get done, Crown of Thorns is a darkly atmospheric fantasy adventure game.

Players assume the role of Brunhilde, a mysterious and silent knight with an unknown mission at an empty castle.  Using magical portals, she goes back and forth between two versions of the castle: one pristine, the other decrepit and ruined, but both mysteriously deserted.  A foreboding presence pervades the ruined castle, causing strange distortions in the world.

Brunhilde must overcome various obstacles to clear the distortions, break through magical seals, and eventually reach the center of the castle, and its mystery.

The primary gameplay of Crown of Thorns is exploration and puzzles, where players must use both versions of the castle to overcome obstacles, in the vein of light world / dark world or past / present type puzzles seen in Zelda games and similar works.  There is no combat in Crown of Thorns, just mystery and exploration.

crown_of_thorns3

There is a lot of religious iconography in Crown of Thorns (in case the name didn’t tip you off).  Throughout the world, you will find (fictional) scriptural passages.  These texts tell of a religion that worships angelic figures called Graces, who brought divine gifts and moral guidance to humankind.  To you, their words serve as a backdrop to the slowly unraveling narrative, and as riddles that tell you how to get past various obstacles in the game.

More on this project as it comes along.

-Louis

Blog Opening!

tangledwebgames

I’m happy to announce the grand opening of the new Tangled Web Games development blog!

Nothing to see here at the moment, but this is where I’ll post updates on the development of projects, as well as sneak-peaks at new art or features in the pipeline.  Enjoy!

-Louis