Obligate now plays in your browser

Obligate now plays in the browser. It is on itch.io: press Run game at the top of wickhouse.itch.io/obligate and it loads right there. Nothing to unpack, and no Windows warning to click past. It is the same demo as the Windows one, and the Windows download is still on the page.

What you need

A desktop or a laptop, a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, and a current browser. The download is about 21 MB, which the loading page counts unpacked, as 50. It is not made for phones.

I built and tested it in Edge, and Chrome is the same engine underneath. I have not been able to try Firefox or Safari properly, so if you play in one of those I would like to hear how it went.

The Windows download runs about twice as fast on my machine, so on an older computer it is still the better way to play. The browser is the quickest way to find out whether you like it.

What is different in the browser

• It opens on a card that says click to start. A browser keeps a page silent until you click it, so the game waits for that click and the sound comes in with it.
• P pauses, as well as Esc. In fullscreen a browser keeps Esc for itself: it leaves fullscreen and the game never hears the key. If that happens in the middle of a run, the run pauses and says so, and resuming takes you back in.
• The run pauses when you switch to another tab or window.
• Settings has Fullscreen, and nothing about window sizes, vsync or a frame cap. Those are the browser's.
• There is no Quit. Close the tab.
• Your profile, your DNA and your strain tree are saved in the browser, for that page. A private window, or clearing the site's data, starts you fresh. The browser's save and the Windows game's save are separate.

What it took

The first browser build ran an ordinary fight at 36 frames a second, on a desktop that runs the Windows build at 75. Two things were eating most of it.

Every cell in the organ was awake. An organ is about 150 cells and the screen shows a dozen. All of them were redrawing their membranes and running their physics every frame, five chambers away from anything. Now a cell far from you sleeps, and wakes before you can see it. It keeps its place and its health, so the chamber you come back to is the one you left.

The whole organ was drawn every frame. It was one picture, so it was either on the screen or off it, and some part of it is always on the screen. It is drawn a chamber at a time now, and the chambers you cannot see are skipped. About 1,300 drawing instructions a frame became 375.

Together, that fight went from 36 to 65 frames a second in the browser, and from 75 to 125 on Windows.

Movement was skipping. Cells move sixty times a second. A browser draws at whatever rate it can manage, and when the two are close but not equal, everything that moves seems to stutter. Bodies and shots are now drawn at the point between their last two steps, which is smooth at any rate.

And the page the game loads in is mine now, not the engine's grey bar. It says how far along it is, in percent and in megabytes, and what it is doing.

The Windows build

The Windows download is still 0.5 from launch day. The speed work and the smoother movement are in the code it is built from, and the next Windows build will have them. Nothing about how the game plays has changed in this update: same organ, same cells, same genes.

Tell me what broke

A browser build has more ways to go wrong than a download: different browsers, different graphics drivers, laptops. If it is slow, will not start, or sounds wrong, I want to know.

• wickhouse.games/feedback takes bugs and opinions with no account.
• Report a bug in the pause menu does the same with your run attached, and from the browser build it says which browser you are in.
• Comments on the itch page are open.

How the game was made, including what was generated and what was not, is on the game's page.