The Tunnel Effect
A downloadable game for Linux
You control a ball, rolling and jumping inside of a tunnel. Don't fall into a hole.
I plan to evolve this basis into a real, fun game with many levels, trippy graphics, multiple long songs and interesting gameplay elements. But for now it's mainly a playable tech demo about creating a Linux game in 20KB and it contains only one level.
However, it features already 3D graphics, keyboard control, music and speech.
This is my first game since many decades. When I was 14 years old, back in 1992, I started to code an Amiga 500 game in 68000 assembler. Sadly I have never finished it.
Later I became a web developer and still today I earn my money with boring serious enterprise web apps.
The 4MB game jam 2023 has motivated me to dust off and brush up my old Amiga hacking skills and bring them into a new millennium. So I learned OpenGL and the Zig programming language, and I wrote my own little game engine.
Unfortunately I don't have the free time of my 14 years old former self anymore. Now with work to do, money to earn and 2 little kids to care for. And my brain is much slower than 30 years ago. So it might take a little bit longer until this becomes a complete game.
Update 2. July 2023
This game has won the 4MB game jam 2023 (jury and community award). How cool is this! However, currently I don't have time to extend this game, at least until the end of August 2023.
Download
Install instructions
This game should run and is tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04.
It needs a OpenGL capable 3D graphics card for 3D acceleration and might not run in a virtual machine if this is not configured correctly.
You can download the zip the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu.zip and unzip it. Then you can start the resulting executable the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu by double-clicking it or right-clicking on it and selecting "Run" in the context menu.
Please note, that the game might need some seconds to start.
If you download the executable the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu directly, you can start the game via terminal or file manager.
Using the terminal
cd Downloads chmod u+x ./the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu ./the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu
Using the File Manager
- Right click the downloaded file
- Select the menu item "Properties"
- Select the Permissions Tab
- Select the checkbox "Allow executing as program"
- Close the dialog
- Right click the downloaded file again
- Select Run in the menu
Troubleshooting
If the game doesn't start, make sure to start it in the terminal to get some kind of error message. If the message is about something like "espeak" try to install this missing dependency with
sudo apt install libespeak-ng1
If this does not work or help, download and start the the-tunnel-effect-ubuntu-without-speech version.
Comments
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Love the music and how it speeds up and slows down with the respective tiles. The voice overs can be a bit intrusive, but that’s somewhat charming too, reminds me of other games back in the day that would play out full voice clips regardless of context.
I think the difficulty is perhaps a bit high for a tech demo. I couldn’t reach the end and it might be overly tuned to your level of expertise after testing and playing it repeatedly. I also think that the “quantum” element doesn’t stick very well, in part because there are so few times you can safely use it. But there’s definitely potential there!
Overall, an impressive showing and especially so for something in 20kb.
Thank you!
You are totally right, that (in my words) the first and yet only demo level is actually pretty bad. It's too hard and does not take advantage of the different gameplay elements (slow/fast/jump fields and quantum-jump). The main reason is, that I have added slow/fast/quantum-jump on the last day before the jam end and then I had no time to build a good first level that uses these elements wisely. It's a shame.
After judging is over, I plan to improve the situation by adding multiple levels that introduce progressively more gameplay elements and raise difficulty slowly.
In regard to the voice overs you are right too. They can really get annoying. But after finding out that Ubuntu comes with a speech generation library (like my old Amiga 500), that sounds actually also a bit like my old Amiga 500, I couldn't resist to go a bit overboard with it :-)
I’m totally with you about the voices, and I personally like them even if my aesthetic sense tells me not to lol. Not everything quirky is bad.
That’s the hard part about a jam, having to stop before you can really leverage all the stuff you built under the hood. If you end up making a fuller version I’d be happy to play it though!
Really cool game