Ethereal Essence

Ethereal Essence is astral city runner. You must collect and maintain essence, a constantly depleting resource as you run through a complete procedural city made of over 30,000 cubes (it is the blender default cube). Follow the arrow located under your feet. Every playthrough is completely different some are platforming focused while others are about pure speed and accuracy. I took inspiration from Plants vs Zombies GW2 pizza game mode but i removed aspects to focus on its core elements. The music was made by Henry Olson, he did a absolutely wonderful job with the composing and the game probably wouldn't be finished by the deadline without him, his music adds the cinematic feel a game these stressful needs. The game is meant to be somewhat retrospective as well monumentality was a topic that i tried exploring in the game, this abstract city feels too large to be real, just look up while you play, the true scale revels itself. The game utilized many different optimization methods to be able to render this many meshes, gpu instancing was utilized so if you don't have a gpu don't expect a very smooth experience, i mean like less then 20 fps and that's on a 12 core processor for me. With gpu instancing it quite smooth, the algorithm that places the essence uses a guess and check algorithm so it does cause occasional frame drops but I couldn't really do anything about it.

W A S D - movement

mouse - view 

Tutorial, use the arrow to find the essence(the cloud thing) as fast as possible to keep your essence high, essence is lost at a rate of 1 per second so its also a timer in a way. If your essence reaches 0 you lose.