Aluk World

Roll a ball, collect bonuses, raymarching ftw

What is this?

Aluk World is a short mini-game paying tribute to Kula World, an obscure but fun PlayStation 1 game. The original version was… totally released in 1996 (please don't check :D)

Why the slightly strange look?

The goal here was to make a playable game for which the rendering is entirely done by a single WebGL fragment shader.

Thanks to raycasting techniques and modern graphics cards, we can use this approach to render crazy stuff unlimited by mere polygons (see Shadertoy and GLSLSandbox for exciting examples). Because it's technically possible to turn shaders like these into actual games (by passing the game state through uniforms), I felt like exploring the idea a bit.

I hope to write a little article about it, meanwhile you can freely check the GLSL shader here.

Voting results

1996-ness
2nd
13%
8.333

This game entered in the Ranked competition (8 entries).

Comments (6)

M2tias
 • 5 years ago • 

Graphics are so cool in this. I wonder how hard it would be to do something like this with actual game play mechanics :P Collision detection etc.
I never played Kula World but this reminds me enough of Glover (1998) to hit the nostalgia.

GagaPete
 • 5 years ago • 

This really feels like a PS1 title, the audio is awesome. Unfortunate that the game only has one level. But the fact that the whole game is rendered in one shader is impressive from the technical standpoint.

SnowFox
 • 5 years ago • 

I can see this turning into a mobile game o:! The retrostyle graphics are very appealing and I would love to see more challenges if this went into further development!

toasty
 • 5 years ago • 

Blimey, wan. This looks and feels very much of the era. I also love the demo feel of it :D. Very cool work in just a fragment shader, can't wait to see you on the showdown!

voxel
 • 5 years ago • 

Aha! This is like some amazing minigame on your neighbours console. Nobody knows exactly what's going on but they know how to win. This is super cool. I caught every drill bit, 100% accuracy. Needs a highscore mode!

kdrnic
 • 5 years ago • 

Very nice soundtrack, the colours plus the scanlines are a very 90s aesthetic.

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Web (WebGL)

Author

wan

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