A downloadable game

A beautiful planet.

A marooned craft.

Someone is reaching out.

You Are Ephemeral is a (currently) linear narrative adventure puzzle game. This demo has been created for the Finally Finish Something Jam and whilst it is self-contained is also indicative of the much larger game in active development. 

The completed title will have far more open world intrigue and the potential for branching storylines. 

There will be more flying. And shooty things. 

And I'd quite like to ride that horse. 

StatusIn development
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorashBorodin
GenreAdventure

Download

Download
You_Are_Ephemeral_alpha_13.7z 706 MB

Install instructions

You'll need 7zip (it's free). 

Hit [Esc] in-game for Main Menu/instructions. [Esc] again to return to game. 

Known Issues: 

-Just discovered the entrance to the mothership can be dodgy. It should trigger on proximity but it appears you have to find the sweet spot. This is new to science and I don't have time to diagnose and fix it. Apologies ya'll. Just like the rocks that sometimes don't want to be picked up - I think it's just a Unity bug. 

-This was built on an older HP 420 Xeon with Windows 7, a GTX 1060 card, an SSD and 16Gb of RAM. It will struggle on anything below what might be considered a mid-tier gaming system. 

-Sometimes the 'Loading' text doesn't appear when transitioning from the outside level to the cave. 

-The 'cloak' in the cave will reappear.

-There's a remote chance the fuel rocks and/or track pieces in the cave can't be grabbed and carried. Just nose about and you'll get some prompts to help work around these bugs. 

-In the cave: once the cart is moving, stay back or it might flip back to the start and run again. 

-You might 'lose' the main menu by tilting the camera to high or low, it's still where you left it though. If you find text indecipherable at some point, move around and you'll find a sweet spot where it's clearly legible. 

-Music and voice acting will be added near the end of the development cycle. A lot of dialogue was recorded but I'm not happy with it. 

-There are currently 3 more partially completed levels not included in the demo. 

-The finished game will be approximately 5 times the gameplay of the demo. 

-Open areas don't contain much worth exploring... yet. 

-The demo will quit to desktop upon completion.

-Your antiVirus app may give a false positive for:  "TrojWare.Win32.Krap.T@101925166" - thanks to: Vimino

Development log

Comments

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I gave it a go, but I think I ran into a good number of bugs or something because I couldn't do anything to the fuel crystal, so I wasn't able to progress through the cave. Never the less, it was pretty interesting and when things get cleaned up in it a bit more I may come back and give it another chance. Thanks for the email to your game and I hope you enjoy the video! 

(1 edit)

What are your system specs? 

Also, I can't reproduce the issue you had with the Fuel Crystal. Are you keeping the left mouse button down and dragging the crystal about?

One slight issue I did notice> the hand shows up slightly before you can interact with it, so you need to move a little closer, like one step. Will look into this. 

Honestly, I can't remember if I was holding the mouse button down, so I'll try that and make sure I'm close enough to it.

You were right but I'm not sure why. I've done my current best to fix the fuel rock problem and also added a simple workaround. Same applies for the moveable tracks. It's a quick and dirty solution but in my defence I wanted it done asap for the FFS Jam. 

Thanks for taking the time to create the game. I enjoyed the game and I was kinda confused in a view areas off the game as there was a bit of a lag, At the start when digging the tunnel and also when I met boris.

It graphicaly it's looking really good and I can see you've put an awful lot of hardwork into this so just keep going.

Regards

wobblyfootgamer

Thanks wobblyfoot, it looks like you were playing one of the previous versions. I've since tried to address many of the confusing aspects and am now pointing the player toward a more linear style of play and working on cleaner and clearer cues and prompts. 

I'm still working on polishing and trying to balance linear vs. open world exploration. After watching your vid and considering I'm entering this into a Jam that finishes soon I'm pretty confident that a linear mode is best for now. 

(1 edit)

This is one of those "I don't even know" kind of games, because I don't even know. But seriously, though, I appreciate you asking my to play this, I really like it when people do that, but I have never been more confused in a game.

Thanks for committing so much time to doing a playthrough. I'll be honest - I haven't watched your video properly all the way through but I did skim it and got the gist of the issues that cropped up. I've been hammering away at them since then and it might take a few days but I'll post a reply here and a devLog once I've uploaded the next alpha. 

You didn't bother watching all of it? Then how are some problems I had supposed to be explained?

I have spent the past few days including pulling an all nighter right now to get this done. I'm sorry I couldn't fit you in yet. You can refer to my latest devLog for more insight. 

(3 edits)

As to the question, I suppose it's pretty easy to intuit just by watching a second of footage.

When I see something's going wrong that's all I need. 

I've covered the lessons learned in my devlog. 

Also, I've just watched your video right through. One thing I will add later is a loading screen for level transitions, I'm still looking for an elegant approach and the time to implement it. Perhaps some placeholder text is necessary. 

Tried three times and... every single time... this... 

Gaawd! not this again!!!! I just fixed that. Tested it several times too. Sorry man, will have to go back in and try again. 

k...it's fixed, will upload this evening GMT +10. Also there's no end-state just yet, you just get to wander around the village aimlessly. 

(1 edit)

Fixed. Thanks for troubleshooting. 

Sweet, I'll download when the new build is up. :) 

It's ready.

(1 edit)

An update is about to go up now that fixes most things and loops back to the start when/if you are captured at the end.  Look for '....Alpha7'

....actually Alpha 8 is much better. I'm also adding a new scene to give a sense of completion to the thing, so Alpha 9-10 will be a complete demo/mini game in itself. 

Thank you for allowing me the chance to play this game, Ash! I will do a YouTube video on this two weeks from now!

Muchas gracias.

Just wanted to let you know I'm putting up revisions all the time, so grab the latest version when you're ready to have a play.