Sunbeam
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Sunbeam is a relaxing first-person puzzle/exploration game set on a small world.
It was developed over five months in the Gamkedo Club by hobbyist game developers, working together in their spare time.
All the puzzles in Sunbeam involve sunlight in some way, using it to power up solar panels that help unlock the world for you to explore. Discover the mysteries of the world, how you came to be there, what happened to the previous inhabitants, and what all these mirrors and solar panels are for.
Take your time, there's no rush.
If you get stuck, I made a developer play through. Spoilers, obviously.
Download
Development log
- Bug fix for joypad controls for the sundialsMay 28, 2017
- Elevator bug fixMay 24, 2017
- Water and joypad control fixesMay 14, 2017
Comments
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Nice little exploration puzzle game. I can see the other islands with all the terrain variation as having more complex puzzles. Overall enjoyable experience.
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.
Hi, nice game! Did you do the mirrors yourself, or is that built into Unity? They are pretty impressive.
I did notice there were some framerate drops though, not exactly making it unplayable, but still noticable.
Overall this was a really fun game (and I hope to play the second part that you mentioned, once it comes out).
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. The mirrors are basically the Unity water system with the ripples turned off. I believe I used this, and modified it slightly for my needs. The mirrors did end up causing some performance issues because each one is effectively a whole other camera rendering the game, so when you get more than a couple all active at the same time they can cause the occasional framerate drop. I tried to keep that to a minimum with some careful design and by turning the mirror reflections off when not needed/noticeable but there are a couple of small areas where sacrifices were made for the sake of the puzzle designs. Since it's not a fast paced game I deemed that an acceptable compromise for the most part. I now realise why everyone uses lasers instead of reflected light beams for this sort of thing! So much simpler.
Using reflected light really sets Sunbeam apart from other games though, because it doesn't use lasers. Experiences like this make us grow as people and game developers :)
This game and it's mechanics were so cool and I would love to see more.
Great video, thanks for sharing! I'm glad you enjoyed playing it. As you spotted, only half the planet got finished within the project time, so we didn't quite wrap it up the way I would have liked. This was developed as a Gamkedo game dev club project so we set a deadline and did what we could within that schedule. Unfortunately I overspeced the scope so we couldn't quite finish the job. One day I hope to finish the second half of the game, which should hopefully fill in the blanks in the story and give it a more satisfying ending. One day!
I can’t wait to see the second half. Thanks for this awsome game
Cool, thanks for playing! I always like watching people play my games.
Loved this!!
It's so satisfying watching someone else solve puzzles you've designed. Thanks for sharing your play through, I really enjoyed watching it!
Brilliant. Great job!
Thanks!
On my system, the graphics look nothing like the trailer or playthrough video, but are extremely garish and confusing. It almost doesn't matter what resolution or graphics quality I pick (except that the two highest resolutions lock up the system and the 1920x1080 - my screen size - doesn't work at all except to say it's running. I'm running on a dual core i5-7400 on an MSI Z170 motherboard w/ 8Gb RAM, an nVidia 9600GT video card with nVidia 340 driver, Kubuntu 17.10 Linux. How can I fix the horrible graphics rendition?
I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing problems with the graphics. The game is made using in the Unity game engine and there seem to be a few other people who have had trouble with Linux builds of Unity games, so I'm investigating to see if there's something that can be done about it. Bear with me and I'll get back to you as soon as I've got a possible solution for you.
OK, so a friend of mine who uses Linux (laptop with a core i5 with integrated graphics) is able to run the game fine on the highest resolution and quality settings. I'm assuming at this stage that it's a graphics driver issue and will continue to see if I can find anyone else who has experienced the same problem as you and resolved it, but so far I've not been able to find anything. I'll let you know if I discover anything useful.
In the meantime, I've tried to install and run Sunbeam on another machine with a newer nVidia card and drivers and two different linux distros, Kubuntu 17.10 and KDE Neon. On both, the game crashes on launch. I sent feedback on both. I do have a laptop with an i5 and integrated intel graphics, also running Kubuntu 17.10. I'll give it a try on that and see how it goes.
Out of interest, have you tried running any other Unity games on those machines? Do you have similar problems, or is it just with Sunbeam? I'm wondering if it could be the particular version of Unity I used or if it's a general problem. I could try rebuilding the game in a different version of Unity to see if that makes a difference. I was planning on issuing an update at some point anyway, so I'll bring that forward if we can't find any other solution.
Since my last response, I have tried to run Sunbeam on my own Linux (Kubuntu 17.10) laptop, which is also an i5 system with integrated graphics. It objected that there were a bunch of 32-bit libraries missing. After resolving that by pulling copies of those libraries from another Kubuntu 17.10 machine, it then crashed on launch with the message "process exited with code 1". I suppose it could be a video driver issue - your friend and I may not be using the same Intel driver (or i5 CPU for that matter). Another oddity I spotted in the cave *.txt file was that it listed 4 CPU cores, although my laptop's i5 is supposedly a dual core.
Okay. The graphics are now ok on my first machine sfter running some regular system updates and updating itch. I don't know what did the trick.?????
Huh, how weird. Well, I'm really glad you managed to resolve the problems, even if it is a mystery as to what caused them in the first place. I'm sorry you had to go through all that though. I hope you enjoy the game enough that it was worth it! At the very least you know you should be able to run other games made with Unity without the same issues.