A Nightly Drifting

For Mini-LD 68 (Theme: Childhood Memories). In memory of late summer nights, seated by a pool of incandescent light, wrestling with paragraph-form homework, half-entranced by the screensaver's endless siren world. (See other entries at: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/06/13/minild-68-an... )

Not much of a game. More a visual prototype, mixing screensavers and homework. Watch a colored-dot landscape drift past and type into a textbox that asks you about the place. The textbox is just for you; it's not evaluated or even saved when you return to the menu. When I play, I imagine I'm seeing a scan of a dead planet's surface, someplace that emitted radio signals millennia ago that is now silent, and I'm being asked to theorize about the extinction event. But you're welcome to imagine up your own pretext.

Visuals are an homage to an After Dark screensaver called "Vista" (which had much more elaborate vertex-landscapes).

Thanks to Dan Shiffman's Perlin terrain tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKB1hWWedMk) for highlighting how easy this basic proc-gen stuff is.