A Webgl Game Where You Deliver Messages on a Tiny Planet
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
messenger.abeto.coTechstoryHigh profile
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A WebGL game where players deliver messages on a tiny planet has been shared on HN, sparking discussion about its beautiful art style, smooth gameplay, and technical implementation.
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Sep 27, 2025 at 11:17 AM EDT
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https://abeto.co/
Their Twitter has three posts:
https://xcancel.com/abeto_co
Three of the people behind it:
https://xcancel.com/vlucendo
https://xcancel.com/michaelsungaila
https://kevincolombin.bandcamp.com/
I wasn't able to deliver packages but I was too mesmerized to be mad about that. Beautiful game. Kudos.
Edit: I did figure it out and completed all the deliveries. So many potential. It reminds me a bit of Sky by thatgamecompany
Edit 2: for the author, I noticed several players approached me and tried to communicate. Please explore games like Journey (thatgamecompany) to see different ways people communicate without chatting. People can help each other, veterans can guide newbies all without using words. Every time I met a player in the game back in the days, they sent me a heartfelt message.
I had no real reason for that expectation, except this is how several games I played in recent years handled it - which made me realize now, that explaining gameplay to new players is something that's actively evolving. There may not be a rulebook, but there are clear trends.
I was surprised to learn the random messengers are other humans!
PS4 specs: ~1.84 TFLOPS FP32, 18 GCN CUs @ 800 MHz, 8 GB GDDR5 @ 176 GB/s.
I think maybe some released-yesterday phone might get close on spikes/bursts, but not on any sustained loads, like gaming, nor would the beat the PS4 on image quality either.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-sony_playstation_5...
Shader throughput (shader count times base clock) is similar too: https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a15-bionic-vs-amd-l...
The iPhone wins on boost shader throughput by a lot, but that’ll throttle. The ps4 has more, slower gpu cores. Not sure how gpu memory bandwidth compares.
This game is beautiful in every way.
I do not play video games, but I played this one through till the end and wish there was more to explore.
Said more about it here[0] already, but the game works perfectly on a foldable and takes the folding/unfolding in stride, without breaking a sweat. You can also see it on desktop by resizing your browser window to change size and aspect ratio (it's probably the same code paths handling it anyway).
Given how almost all mobile and web games I played manage to get this scenario wrong in some way, I applaud the authors for making all the right choices.
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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403407
[0] https://i.redd.it/jv2yw7uqmu3e1.png
exactly, realy well made!
shrug
drc = 3d shapes (I think)
ogg = audio
All of these would normally be bundled in the game installer, but are sent down piece by piece over the network in this case.
Then there's some wasm and js for the game's business logic. The browser has WebGL APIs that enable running all of this.
I'm assuming they used a library or engine like Unity, Godot or Three.js that supports WebGL as an execution target.
drc is Draco Compression, it's a library from Google to compress mesh data
But I kind of understand it. I did a somehow similar project before and for people who are not trained in video game style controls it is quite hard to get used to them ad-hoc.
Assuming this project is at least partially aimed at art directors, project leads and such aka people who aren't necessarily gamers, detached movement/camera controls are a bit risky.
There were a lot of cool scenic locations, that almost beg for the ability to just stand somewhere and look around, yet you can't really look down or up very conveniently.
Also, walking locations where you might fall, be kind of nice to be able to look at where you're aiming at. Minor nit mostly, just fit the explore a scenic island theme.
If I was in Unity, I would address this issue by manually placing a bunch of virtual cameras in the world and using cinemachine to blend between them. The size of this world is small enough to justify manual placement and configuration of each. You could also just focus on the complex areas and let the default follow cam handle the rest.
Was this dynamic on your radar when building the game and camera system? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Nice game otherwise.
as for the game itself, I couldn't understand how to deliver the messages.
https://summer-afternoon.vlucendo.com
?
The design of the latter allows packing more details in a smaller space. Also, players are forced to face a lot of unexpectedness, as navigation becomes a natural challenge (which isn't difficult to overcome, which is exactly the point). It's like the blind men and the elephant, and can feel very limited, but you end up using your brain, and, in that process, you fully embrace the world details.
Besides the visual style being very similar, there's an island in the game with about the same amount of NPCs, and they all have their own lives and many give you chores like this one.
feedback after 5m
* there should be a help section, all i could figure out is how to walk with up/left/down/right, and w/a/s/d. And the mouse. * I got nauseous after a bit, not sure if that is everyone or just me but I did have some bad nausea on a ride (teacups) at the local carnival/fair a few months ago, and it comes back every now and then. * the controls on desktop seem too sensitive. I had to eventually walk with W and then go left and right with the arrow keys, but even then it was too sensitive
I left after 5m because of the nausea.
I liked the music and peacefulness.
But the game is beautiful and peaceful and I’m still glad I got to experience it. I’ll definitely share it with some friends. Thank you for making it.
Its got a Zelda Wind Walker vibe that I love. It was fun just running around exploring.
Can I ask the author if AI helped him with this? Is it multiplayer too?
I ask as I have been deving a webgl game for a few years
huge success as side project and for the CV!
Played through all missions and at the end had enough of the concept but appreciated the AOD. Especially the little bits of the environment, like the sleeping fox in the forest, were nice.
The one thing that transported me out of the game was the arbitrary blocking around the ocean / the end of the stream. (I assume those go to the same place, from different sides.)
It seems on such a tiny world the water should never be more than waist deep, so why not just let us explore the whole thing. I didn't quite feel like I got to go all the way around the tiny world, and being fenced by an invisible barrier broke the fourth wall.
“Explore and Make Deliveries”
If I may ask, how did you do the environment models? Did you use textures and UV mapping? or just untextured models with a shader for the contours?
There's also a threejs reference in a hard to reach area.
immediately hit a bug where i had like 3 character skins at once though
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