Icarus - HAGJ 2021

Icarus is a solo-project about the saga of Icarus and Daedalus. It is exploring their escape from the tower of King Minos in a story-driven environment.

For new players, I am recommending to start with the Prologue - here the story of father and son is introduced and seamlessly connects it with the story of the game.

In the Tutorial you will learn about the warnings Daedalos gave his son, and how the game picks them up and reflects them back to the player.

Use S or ⬇ to descend towards the sea. Press W or ⬆ to stop decending.

Use W or ⬆ to rise up towards the sun. Press S or ⬇ to stop rising.

Use ESC or Q to leave the game and get back to the start screen.

The Tutorial lets you play with these controls and provides some extra information.

Icarus is gliding through the air. So you have to move early, to make him find the gap in front of him. When you play in Normal mode, predicting the flight curve is easier than in Hard mode. In both modes, the rise and decent is influenced by how wet your wings are. In Hard mode, on top of that, the direction of the wind (shown by the arrow indicator) is a big factor. If it blows upwards, Icarus rises faster and sinks slower - and vice versa.

Hint: When your wings heat up in the 1st level, they will dampen slower in the stormy 2nd level.

The game provides you 3 levels. I was aiming for a Look&Feel that lets players mentally connect with ancient Greece. When you enter a new level, a checkpoint will automatically be triggered.

The story is embedded in the games scenes and follows the players progress. Originally I was planning to record important events during the game in form of real-time engravings in the scenes background. Together with the story text they would then have become a frieze showing the saga of how the players shaped it with their own decision. In the time frame given by the Jam I wasn't able to do that.

Right after leaping from the Tower, Icarus has to cross this region, which is filled with obstacles like high cliffs, birds and ships. To survive, he has to find his way around them.

When Gods notice that Icarus is flying like a bird, they outrage. No man is allowed to defy the laws of nature. So they are sending a fierce storm after him, and summon a beast from the depths of the sea to stop him.

After successfully surviving the wrath of the gods, Icarus finally comes to a place that will provide him shelter and the opportunity to start a new life with his newly gained freedom.

For those who want to read and follow the story without distraction, I recorded a playthrough from beginning to end.

My implementation has 3 flaws which I couldn't fix - a big sorry for that in advance.

On the installed itch.io app version, there is no sound. The problem comes from me using HTML5Audio instead of WebAudio. This issue showed up too late to allow a proper fix, so please play the browser version to enjoy the full experience.

Sometimes Icarus is not reacting to your commands - which is really annoying (also for me). Before this happens, you will hear a wing flap "out of nowhere" - when I hear that, I know, pressing the next key twice might give Icarus the right command which is otherwise just lost.

And third, sometimes Icarus collides with obstacles by just being close to them, but not touching them (I tried to implement the colliding areas as best as I could, hit F8 during the game to check yourself).

Last two problems stem from the fact, that I am moving all my objects by applying CSS transitions to them. With this technology, transitioning objects can't be observed and monitored on a perfect pixel-level; - which can lead to the described side-effects. After some play-testing in Chrome, this seems to be more a problem in Firefox than in Chrome.

Music: www.bensound.com and www.freesound.org, InspectorJ

All the Artwork and coding was done by me.

I am using a CanoScan LiDe 300 to scan my hand-drawn assets. For digital processing I am using Krita. The game was developed in Firefox browser using native HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies (no Canvas API, but DOM based nodes). Code Editor is Microsoft Visual Studio. For my conceptual work I am using Microsoft PowerPoint.