Midnight Lament

Young Midnight is trapped in a stellar loop and desperately seeks to understand how she ended up there. Help her understand what's troubling her mind. Discover how to break free from this stellar loop; you only have 12 minutes!

How to play

• Use the camera to look around the Clock Hub.
• Click on a door to inspect it, click again to enter the room.
• Use Escape to return to the Hub.
• Rooms are full of interactive objects, try clicking on them.

Tips

• The Twelfth Hour door is not meant to be solved immediately.
• Locked rooms all have specific conditions to be unlocked, you need to inspect other rooms to understand how.

Team

Ackermiam	Inner Sun	Alfeha
Level Design UI System Music System Dev Music Composer	Engine Development Gameplay Level Design 3D Modeling	Art Direction Concept Art 2D Art Story

About the Music

Ackermiam composed the entire soundtrack using FL Studio, relying mainly on the Flex instrument for all sounds. He also created a progressive track for the Clock Hub, which evolves over time.

You can listen to the complete original soundtrack on Youtube.

About the Art

Alfeha designed all the artwork and assets for the game using ProCreate on iPad and Photoshop.

I created the artwork with three key concepts in mind: the passage of time, constellations, and spiritual meaning, as we wanted to explore the notion of grief and how people go through all kinds of emotions. I wanted to create a strong identity with a dreamlike theme, to draw new people into this mysterious world. The bravest players will be rewarded with special artwork at the end!

About the Engine

We created a basic game engine from scratch in TypeScript, running on ThreeJS in WebGPU mode for 3D rendering and Howler.js for music. Check out our social media profiles for a detailed technical overview and to learn more about our next game.

Raycaster

Since our game is a point-and-click, we built versatile raycasting logic with:

• Object collections that are only activated under certain conditions, so we don't click on objects through walls
• Custom callbacks that can be easily defined and support for onClick, onHover and onBlur events

This logic was used to handle:

• Hub/Door interactions
• interactive objects inside rooms
• the final puzzle

Level Design and Room Layout

The entire game follows a list of flags such as keys found, switch activated, clock progression, etc. This allowed us to easily create complex conditions, since we just had to create a function that checks and updates the game state accordingly. For example, a door can indicate if it's locked by returning if time > 0.25 and switch1 = true.

The Rooms

Each room is represented by a door and a room interior.

Each door has an isLocked function that can be as complex as we want.

The interior of each room is represented by a JS object with all the props and interactive objects placed relative to the room. These interactive objects can trigger all sorts of flags and allowed us to quickly create keys and switches to open doors, link elements to clock progression, etc. 

Music Engine

The game triggers different tracks based on which room you're in, and the hub gets special treatment with a layered track that progressively becomes more complex, stressful and intense as time passes.

We didn't have time to add it, but the engine also supports one-shot sound effects.