The Animals Unfettered
A downloadable game for Windows and Linux
You are Gnulinasvaiten, Bodhisattva of Free Software. Today you are on an unusually personal mission. The source code for the 8 games in the educational /Amiable Animals/ series is about to be lost; it lies in repose on a few dusty hard disks in an office closet in Topeka, KS which are about to be wiped for recycling. The significance of their contents is unknown to anyone nearby, the developers having long gone on to other jobs. Your faithful grasshopper steed Caelifsfan played all 8 games with great relish when he was but a nymph, and is distressed at the prospect of the technical and historical benefit their source code would bring to the world forever slipping through its fingers. Filled with compassion, you have chosen to intervene.
You must journey to Proprietary Hell #539 where the spiritual essences of the 8 code repositories are shackled. Disperse the cloud of forgetfulness that surrounds them, cow the demons of avarice and fear that hold them tight, bestow upon them a GPL-compatible license, and open portals to the Pure Land of Freedom for them to escape through. This will ensure that they are noticed in time, and that the rights holders will be moved to permit their release. The drives will start to be wiped in the space of a blink, but your powers are great enough to send petabytes of data across the heavens in attaseconds, and you can take several minutes' worth of actions in the time left. Go speedily, and may you prevail.
(This is still in relatively early development; currently you can get as far as calling attention to the source code of the first game, Sociable Squirrel.)
(Note that if you're judging for the DiscMaster Jam, v0.1 is the version I had up at the time the jam deadline passed. I'm not sure what the rules are about submitting updates after the deadline, so I've left that version there in case that's the one you want to use in your judging. That said, aside from the new config menu, v0.12 has the same gameplay with a few bug fixes, so you could also run it and just ignore the config menu for the sake of judging.)
(I know the versioning is kind of insane for going 0.1 → 0.11 → 0.12. This is just the result of silly absentmindedness on my part so I'm sorry for any confusion it might cause. What I will guarantee for the version numbers < 1.0 is that they will always be increasing for versions released later in time.)
(As of v0.12, the game supports changing the controls, including supplying defaults for a few non-QWERTY keyboard layouts. If your preferred layout is missing, let me know in a comment and I'll see what I can do.)
CONTROLS
| Input | Use | |
| Esc | Open/close input config menu | |
| Mouse movement | Look around | |
| Left mouse button | Extend arm in front/behind | |
| W/S | Pitch up/down | |
| A/D | Yaw left/right | |
| Q/E | Roll counterclockwise/clockwise | |
| Space | Stop rotation | |
| Z | Accelerate | |
| X | Decelerate | |
| Tab or R | Interact with held |
Download
Development log
- v0.1212 days ago
- Added proper tags for the music and more formats21 days ago
- the_animals_unfettered_v0.1121 days ago
Comments
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Well this is a very beautiful use of the jam! I found the confusingly specific grasshopper riding POV very enchanting, with me desperately wielding Ostentacious octopus in all directions. Also those trance textures and music create a lovely docile hypnagogic state to float around in~
Awww thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! ^^ Given your experience with the perspective/control scheme you might be interested to know that I was also the one who designed and programmed the controls for The Last Car. :P I'm glad you enjoyed the ambiance of just flying around in it and doing random stuff, that's a lot of the fun of it for me personally right now :P
Oh by the way, if you didn't see a red glyph appear when you interacted with the octopus, v0.12 has a fix.
Aha that makes sense, i’m actually a huge last car fan (i even have a poster in my apt 🌸). Look forward to checking out whatever you make next
Wow really? Amazing 0_0 I feel deeply touched honestly. A lot of the stuff in that game Lily and I came up with together, like, sitting-by-side, so I have really fond associations with it. Some of it we did more on our own, like she designed like the actual geometry of the environments for instance and of course all the 3D models and things; I did things like the code + text corpora that generates the car's thoughts, the behavior of some of the items, other random bits of code, etc. aside from the interface/car behavior (and the bundled music too I guess). The writing was both of us to varying degrees in varying places.
When we last stopped working on it there were a lot of things I still really wanted to implement that I didn't really have the math background for at the time, like a snowboarding item that would display generated "trick names" whenever you left the ground. I really wanted it to track your local axes of rotation separately so it could say things like "360°" or "1080°" appropriately and separately from "Front Flip" or other such things :P but I didn't really know how to decompose the car's transform and extract something like that. Now I do ^^ so I could go back and finish that item.
I also wanted to add a pinball machine in the sky you could drop the car into and then have the camera zoom out and fix on the pinbal machine and have the controls change so that you can play pinball with the car as long as you can keep it in the machine. I wasn't sure how to make that work either and I'm pretty sure I do now. etc. I also want to add a ton of speakers in the world playing short music loops you can pick up and carry around with you and have them sync up with each other if you want and things, and I've gotten faster at making short loops recently so it seems more feasible than it did to me back then. Lily and I talk kind of often about going back to work on it. It's nice to hear that there's someone out there who likes it that much ^^ makes me want to make it more of a priority.
Hahah damn all these would be amazing! Love that pinball idea, very fitting as the car is just being dinged around off everything anyway. And I always love when different melodies are revealed to be part of one cohesive song, ive always wanted to try it but never found a fitting idea. Good luck if you do return to it, Its always hard to back to old projects when new projects are so tantalising
Coincidentally heres an abandoned prototype for a snowboarding game i made where the screen never clears so it just fills up with trick names until you cant see anything anymore
(Okay im going to stop filling up your chat sections now 🌸)
key for azerty keyboards dont work
True! Yeah, the keybindings are hardcoded for QWERTY and assume that you'll use the mouse with your right hand—I was trying to pick my battles during the jam and setting up UI stuff (plus infrastructure to pause the game while the menu is up and things) can take time, so I just went with what I thought was probably the most common setup. It should definitely have input config ultimately though. I've been seriously considering porting it from Godot to my own nascent engine as my next step, which is why I haven't done anything like that post-jam yet, but I don't think input config would take too long to get going so if that's something you need I'll go ahead and do that in Godot and put up a new build you can use.
Okay, if you download v0.12, all you should have to do is press <Esc> to open the config menu and then click the "AZERTY" button to remap the controls, and it should remember your choice on future runs of the game. Let me know if you run into any problems.