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.
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.