Serene is a game about a futuristic space Odyssey, an eventful adventure through a hacked space station. Serene takes one of the most successful physics puzzle games of all time, Portal, and splits it into bite-size chunks for casual gamers. Below our handcrafted graphics and sound effects lies our deep worry about the risk of AI rebellion in the future.
A Video demo is available on YouTube.
Authors: Tao Zhang, Yangyang He, Erik Stevenson, Cullen Rombach
A strong title that successfully aims for a “sum greater than the parts” approach by mixing beams, fans, black holes and obstacles into the challenge of using inertia to overcome limited fuel — and under time pressure no less. The team clearly focused on good gameplay and level design, but still managed to make the artwork and presentation polished as well. Using the body of the astronaut as a gameplay element is both clever and technically impressive. Since all the body parts can clearly animate independently, there is a missed opportunity to blow the guy to pieces when he dies The game-over transition upon death is abrupt.
Good concept which is well-implemented; and great variety in the levels and the various mechanics! Plus, there’s a hint of a story. The text box was a good call as a communication mechanism which could be implemented within the short time frame of the project.
Serene takes place in the future on a spaceship, run by a seemingly benevolent AI named Serene, that serves as a place to test new technology. Our main character, TECH-17, is testing a jetpack and must navigate through a sequence of physics-based test chamber puzzles to discover the truth about the AI as the ship slowly degrades around him. This game takes one of the most successful physics puzzle games of all time, Portal, and splits it into bite-size chunks for the casual gamer while removing the unnecessary complexity of portals and adding the fresh new jetpack mechanic.
- SFML 2.4.2
- C++11 Compiler
- Cmake
- Make
git clone --recursive https://github.com/hyy369/serene
cd serene
mkdir Release
cd Release
cmake ..
make
./game