Towards The Sunrise

About the game

You are a small glider skimming a dark, quiet landscape at a speed that never stops rising. Somewhere ahead the sun is about to come up, and the whole game is about reaching it. In practice that means staying alive for as long as you can: steer left and right through a field of rocky spires, towers and pale glowing mushrooms, and do not touch anything. Each second adds to your score, and the faster you go, the more every second is worth.

The terrain is built from pieces that keep spawning ahead of you, so no two runs are the same. Along the way you pick up three kinds of bonus: an orange one that speeds you up and raises your score multiplier, a yellow one that throws the glider up into the air for a moment, and a blue one that gives 100 points at once. The settings screen lets you turn the music and the sound effects on and off and change how many obstacles appear and how widely they are spread, so you can make a run gentler or much harder. Runs are short, which makes it easy to try again.

It is a one-person project by AlexNottaBen, inspired by the endless-glider arcade style, with a menu, a help screen, a short opening scene and a credits screen, and two long ambient tracks by Kevin MacLeod.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the game to load (about 38 MB, downloaded only when you press the button; the 3D models and music take a few seconds on a slow connection). Press Start, watch or wait out the short opening scene, and you are flying. The game is played with the keyboard.

Controls

Tips

Make small moves. The glider accelerates all the time, so small, early corrections are safer than big swerves at the last moment.

Look ahead, not at the glider. The scenery is dark, so read the shapes on the horizon and start steering before an obstacle is close.

Orange is risky. The speed bonus raises your multiplier but also makes everything come faster. Take it only when the way ahead is clear.

Tune the difficulty. In Settings you can change the number and spread of the obstacles, which is a good way to practise before a high-scoring run.

FAQ

Does it work on a phone? No. The game needs the keyboard.

Is my best score saved? No. The score of each run is shown at the end, but the game does not keep a record between runs.

Is the game free to share? Yes. The code is free software under the GNU GPL version 3 or later, and the art, models, music and sounds are under free licences listed below.

Credits and licence

Towards The Sunrise was made by Alexander Serhiienko (AlexNottaBen). The code is under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or any later version, and the source of this build is linked from this page. The game runs on Godot Engine 3.5.3, under the MIT licence.

• Interface images by AlexNottaBen, CC BY 4.0.
• 3D models, all CC BY 4.0 from Sketchfab: "Hand Glider" by Vincent Decc, "Lowpoly Mushrooms" by Janosch and "Light Test 4 - Sunrise (Leave Mr. Camera Alone)" by Tycho Magnetic Anomaly; the pyramid is CC0.
• Music: "Equatorial Complex" and "The Lift" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0.
• Sound effects from freesound.org: pickup by SoundDesignForYou (CC0), start of flight by newlocknew and crash by AUDACITIER (CC BY 4.0).
• Particles by Kenney (CC0). Fonts Squada One (Admix Designs) and Open Sans (The Open Sans Project Authors), SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Changes made for this site: the four large textures of the glider model were imported at a lower resolution (a modification of that CC BY work); the Exit buttons, which only stop the program, were hidden; and one scene material was renamed so that the sky loads in the browser. Nothing else in the game was changed. The full licence texts and the source of this build are linked from this page.