“Ascent” is a tiny casual game about evolution and the circle of life, where you guide an aquatic creature to the surface of the ocean. The final game evolved (sic) from an older game jam submission, which I ported from Unity to Godot, and enhanced over the course of two weeks. I made a video about the porting experience:

The game runs in mobile and desktop browsers. It’s free to play – if you want to try, click the button below:

Technically, this was mainly interesting for the challenges in making a browser game:

• With Godot 4.3, single-threaded web builds are back, so web sites without SharedArrayBuffer support can be targeted now – great news!
• The game supports desktop and mobile in the same executable, with flexible layout, as well as switching between keyboard / mouse and touch input handling.
• Small download size. The standard web export template in Godot 4.3 produced a build of around 30MB, which I boiled down to 8MB:
  • I compiled a stripped-down engine version as a custom web export template.
  • Godot doesn’t support .wasm compression yet, so I manually compressed it, requiring only minor tweaks to the loader code.