Category: Releases

Crown of Thorns released

tangledwebgames

Well. It’s been a journey. This project, started on a whim in 2017, picked up and put down many times, is now live on Itch (and “Coming Soon” on Steam) and Steam!

https://tangledwebgames.itch.io/crown-of-thorns

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2212810/Crown_of_Thorns

Crown of Thorns is a dark, atmospheric adventure game, full of bleak environments, scraps of lore and scripture, and glitch art. There is no combat, just exploration, mystery, puzzles, and a slowly evolving story. A walkthrough is also available for download in case you get stuck.

After some deliberation, I decided to charge $3 for Crown of Thorns. Not because I expect to make a profit, but because I don’t want to cheapen the work of other indie devs who need the money more than I do. I doubt I’ll even break even on art commissions, to say nothing of the hundreds of hours I put into this project, and yet I know there will be some who think “An RPGMaker game by a no-name dev that has you can play through in a couple hours? And you’re charging money for it??”

I dunno. This may be a silly hill to die on. I’m not a capitalist, and I don’t think money is the best way for a culture to express its values. And maybe voluntary payments and platforms like Patreon are a better model for independent artists anyway. But still, I don’t like the expectation that some players have that indie devs’ time and effort aren’t worth anything.

In any case, there are free copies available on Itch for anyone for whom the $3 is a barrier at all.

-Louis

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