Snowblind
Introduction
Snowblind is a zen game, inspired by games such as robotfindskitten.

We are:
James Fan <jam fan at stanford dot edu>
Allan Hsu <allan hsu at stanford dot edu>
Keith Simmons <k simmons at stanford dot edu>


Hype
snowblind is not a traditional game of goals and conflict, but one of exploration. Players wander a winter landscape, listening to the same Hooverphonic song over and over. Players discover objects, bringing about the sound of children's laughter. Through experimentation, players are able to uncover alternate states of reality. Players can walk beyond the boundaries of the game world, leaving their corporal beings. In this form, they can travel beyond the confines of the world, going on indefinitely, or until they exceed MAX_FLOAT, whichever comes first.

Reality
snowblind is probably so zen because a lot of time was spent on engine code; so much time, in fact, that we never got to writing the game known as "Sled or Die!" Thus, snowblind was born. The name is intended to conjure images of hopelessly wandering through a barren, desolate wasteland full of strange objects and beings, much like the experience of trying to find useful information on OpenGL API extensions.

Screenshots





Requirements
Still interested? Here's what you need:

Linux. We used Debian sid. Your milage may vary from distro to distro.

an OpenGL-capable video card that has at least 4 texture units and supports the GL_TEXTURE_PROGRAM_NV extension. Currently, that means you need a GeForce3.

Some sort of gamepad/joystick on /dev/js0. We got full functionality from a playstation2 controller attached to a usb convertor doohickey. It shows up as a two-axis 16-button joystick in linux. You don't need the second axis, but many of the forementioned secret states of reality will be unaccessable if you don't have all 16 of those buttons. You should be able to play with the keyboard, but functionality is limited.

SDL. We used the version 1.2.2 libraries that are current on Debian sid.

ALSA sound drivers. You need version 0.9.X. We wrote the realtime sound mixer straight to libasound.

libmad, a high-quality mp3 decoding library.

Download

This is the source. Binaries are included. You should run "rendertest" from withing the sledordie/render/ directory. If you feel adventurous and want to build from source, configure scripts are included, as well as makefiles. You will need the above-listed libraries to compile.