Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection (katamari.vaguespac.es)

118 pointsby thebigship2 days ago37 comments

thepuglor 6 hours ago

Every Katamari Damacy clone misses what made it so great: the transition between zoom levels. "I started so small and now I've sucked up everything on the planet!" The transitions between zoom levels was so well done in the original game, and none of these clones even attempt it.

thaumasiotes 5 hours ago

I enjoyed watching someone else play a Katamari game that ended with rolling around the planet picking up monuments. That was fun.

Later, I bought Katamari Damacy, and it doesn't have that aspect. You can't suck up everything on the planet. You can get moderately bigger and pick up objects the size of a car instead of objects the size of a paper clip.

What you're describing just isn't a strength of the original game; it was a strength of the sequels.

janingaming 5 hours ago

What? I just played Katamari Damacy (Reroll, which afaik is an HD remaster but no new content) and the last levels absolutely have you rolling up things at planet scale

ChoGGi 4 hours ago

You're correct, it's a remaster.

ndriscoll 4 hours ago

In the original, the last zoom out in the final level was after 0.8 km, and you could roll up clouds (one of which comes with a god), tornados, rainbows, and eventually the landmass the game takes place on so it's just ocean.

ChrisRR 3 hours ago

What you mean is you only played the first level. The game gets bigger with each level

criddell 5 hours ago

For me, it's the music. I'll have those songs in my head for days after playing.

Also, the items in the game are very artfully arranged.

This version (the part I played) just dumps everything on the floor and the music is lifeless.

coef2 an hour ago

I agree. The original game had many songs that are addictive.

_superposition_ an hour ago

My people lol. First thing I missed was the music and played maybe 5 seconds

echelon 5 hours ago

This!

You start off small picking up crumbs and trinkets.

You get larger and pick up sports equipment.

Then you start picking up people and they run away from you.

Then cars. Then buildings. Then cargo ships.

Then mountains. Weather systems.

Planets.

And the level designs are fun and intricate. The levels you're inside eventually become the objects you roll up.

You start inside a house at the size of a mouse. Then later you come and roll up that house and its whole neighborhood.

It feels like the horror movie "The Blob", except it's quirky and adorable when you start devouring the whole town.

All of these clones are flat and miss the incredibly good level design.

tietjens 5 hours ago

Also the wobble when you're off balance and have one object much bigger than the others off-centered.

PalmPilotProMax 5 hours ago

The well-designed and -implemented zoom out (basically a "level up" dopamine hit) is just one crucial bit of Katamari Damacy's greatness.

The other two are:

1. The whimsically melancholic music 2. King of All Cosmos' majestic facial hair and crotch bulge

chubbnix 4 hours ago

Re: point 2.) Personally, it’s his bolster pillow shaped head that always brings me back for more.

alwa 8 minutes ago

Not to mention his Royal Rainbow!

ChrisRR 3 hours ago

There's no single thing that made katamari great. It's the sum of its parts

It's the chaos, the music, the growth over a level, the characters, the visual design, the sound effects.

The sequels showed that when any one of them suffers then it makes for a less endearing game on the whole.

jareklupinski 3 hours ago

ah i guess that could be rolled into the level select: scaling the ball progresses through the collections, making it a linear experience, but one that could be more.... curated :D

tgtweak an hour ago

It's actually quite difficult since it requires many models for each item based on zoom scale progression. Very doable but often skipped, and some are potentially in 5+ zoom levels.

Also hard to reproduce: the selection of objects, the art style (decidedly Japanese) the ambiance (king/prince/planets, the pool table when you lose), music and sounds, and a lot of the little things that make it delightful like things running away, the selection of items - the fact that parts of the world that are not objects become items to pick up at large scales.

vunderba 2 days ago

Nice job~~ Some feedback:

• Provide a toggle for the music. It sounds like it was procedurally generated by Claude Code. I understand CC was trying to give it a "Damacy vibe", but it just doesn't have any of the charm. I can still sing the very memorable original's theme despite not having played it in over two decades.

• The camera has a bit too much elasticity when you haven't accreted much on the ball. For whatever reason, good camera controls give even SOTA LLMs a surprising amount of grief. Might be worth a bit of manual tuning.

frereubu 7 hours ago

Agreed, this was fun. Some other feedback:

- The down key should move backwards

- I found the left / right keys don't just spin left / right, they move forward a bit, which I found quite frustrating at points.

frereubu 2 hours ago

Edit: Perhaps this mimics the gameplay in Katamari Damacy? I haven't played that, so if it directly mimics the original probably best to keep it that way.

kipchak an hour ago

The original uses quasi tank tread style controls, somewhat mirroring the character pushing with each hand on the Katamari. For example pushing forward on both sticks would move you forward, pushing forward on the left stick and back on the right would turn to the right, and pushing left on both sticks would move you left.

thaumasiotes 5 hours ago

> Nice job~~

I hope you'll forgive an unrelated tangent: what culture does your ~~ tag come from?

ChoGGi 4 hours ago

AOL I think? I noticed it happening a lot in September.

vunderba 2 hours ago

Its funny I've never really thought about it until now. I think I might have picked it up from living in Taiwan, several of my friends on LINE and PLURK would end their sentences in tildes.

AdmiralAsshat 24 minutes ago

A worthy successor to Doom: The Gallery Experience [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GPcr6O_Smk

viraptor 6 hours ago

On Firefox mobile, the controls are way too sensitive. I could barely aim at things. Also the joystick indicator stays in place even though you can press and drag from anywhere.

The loading is extremely slow - I'm not sure I need all the objects loaded before selecting the first level.

Also I'm not sure if some textures didn't load, but the first level is just... almost empty with random things on the floor? It doesn't have any interesting surroundings. https://photos.app.goo.gl/cEnu76hb5JeJ3DhP7 If it's not an artefact of my phone, a Katari clone needs way more polish/scenery.

pfdietz 39 minutes ago

Do I want to play this?

Nah.

Nah nah nah, nah nah, nah nah.

dwallin 2 hours ago

What I would give for this to take place in an actual model of the Met. I bet you could pass an agent the floor maps of the met, along with some photos of the interior and get a pretty good recreation.

supersimpleguy 3 hours ago

Neat little distraction! Thanks for sharing. Sorry about the absolutely dreadful people in these comments that cannot let themselves have an iota of fun without screaming how angry they are about it.

sloga 3 hours ago

i loved katamari on xbox. >.>

feerfreeflight 6 hours ago

Great work! Would love to see this extended to other museums and maybe architectural sites

codingdave 6 hours ago

At this point, every web game I try starts with testing for one specific bug - if you right click while moving, does it screw up the movement so that you are still moving after you let up on WASD.

Yup. It does.

It is a cute idea. But the implementation is flawed.

And if the goal is to help people explore cultural artifacts, building a game that actually minimizes the importance of the artifacts, and literally just drives the player to squash them up into a great big ball might not be the best way to help people actually appreciate the items.

supersimpleguy 3 hours ago

You must be a blast at parties.

> Every time I open a web game, I immediately see if this one bug that I can actively avoid exists. If the bug exists, I must tell everyone so they know how smart I am that I know about this bug that I can easily avoid yet cannot stop talking about.

That's you. That's what you sound like.

ChrisRR 3 hours ago

There's a million ways to already explore these artifacts. A silly game to mess about with them isn't a bad thing

rererereferred 27 minutes ago

I prefer the right click menu to work like normal over them overriding it so it doesn't work.

Larrikin 3 hours ago

Disappointed to find out there is still a Sackler wing from this game

stronglikedan 3 hours ago

I couldn't imagine letting such an insignificant thing negatively affect my feelings.