While Vampires Sleep

Play as either a vampire or a vampire hunter in a Townscaper-meets-Luigi's Balloon World game.

As a vampire, you must escape to your castle before sunrise. Use your blood magic to alter your castle before finding a place to sleep for the day. Be careful not to create and share links here on Itch or with your friends - they might take it as a challenge and come to vanquish you!

As a hunter, track vampires back to their homes by clicking on links in the comments. Find and stake the vampire, but beware! It took you all day to track them - the sun is setting, and you only have a short time to reach them before they can take bat form and escape.

Controls:

In edit mode:

• Left click to place block
• Ctrl + left click to remove block (command + left click on Mac)
• Hold right click and drag to orbit the camera
• Tab to switch to record mode

In record and play mode:

• WASD to move
• R to reset
• F to finish your level (only in record mode)
• Tab to switch to edit mode (only in record mode)

Known issues:

Sometimes the mouse becomes jerky in play or record mode. If this happens, press escape to release the mouse, then click on anything outside the game window, and then click on the game again.

Submission for AI and Games Jam

This is a submission for the AI and Games 2022 Jam. The AI used in this is Wave Function Collapse (WFC), powered by Wildtile (my asset), which enables the 3D tile building.

This jam, I focused on learning how to create tile models and optimise them for WFC. Even optimised WFC implementations can be slow if you use models that haven't been designed for them.

The game uses the deterministic marching cubes WFC as a compressor, allowing you to store your high-fidelity level in such a small amount of data that it can fit inside a URL. When the other player loads your link the game will decompress the map info and recreate your high-fidelity castle exactly. Marching cubes WFC gives a good level of user control while maintaining a small payload, which fits this game. Other level sharing techniques would give different pros and cons (e.g. less control when building the castle, payload so large you need to store levels on a server, etc.).

The Isolation theme

I started with "isolation" -> hiding in a world you built, where WFC would help you build. It's not fun to hide if no one's looking for you! So I built on WFC's strengths and designed the game around sharing levels with friends.

Why do level links go to carbidefunction.co.uk?

It makes challenge links work, so your friends can play your level with one click.

Itch.io embeds HTML5 games in their own window called an IFrame. IFrames are sandboxed and cannot access lots of things from the owning page, preventing a lot of security vulnerabilities. Of particular note is that IFrames cannot access query strings in URLs without the page's consent, which Itch doesn't grant.

While Vampires Sleep uses query strings to deliver the level data. The Carbide Function page manually passes the query string through to the IFrame, allowing the game to load without any extra steps for players while maintaining security.

Credits

By Anthony Diggle

Title art by Tony Dong @beastcountenance

Uses Wildtile (by Anthony Diggle)

Uses Character Movement Fundamentals

Moon texture from transparentpng.com