Familiar

A small open-world game about one Halloween night in a New England hill town, on the Strata engine. You are Wren, twelve, out trick-or-treating, and helping your grandmother, who is a Wiccan, keep Samhain: lighting lanterns for the town's beloved dead, brewing her cider, and bringing her old cat's spirit home by midnight. And tonight you can turn into a cat.

Status: in development. See CONCEPT.md for the game, MVP.md for what the first playable version holds and its milestones, RESEARCH.md for the sources behind its portrayal of Samhain and Wicca, and ARCHITECTURE.md for how it is built.

Building

The rules and tests build without a GPU:

cmake -S . -B build -DFAMILIAR_WITH_STRATA=OFF
cmake --build build -j
ctest --test-dir build

Playing on Windows

tools/play-familiar.bat builds and starts the game in one step: download it and double-click it. It needs Git; it installs CMake and the Visual Studio C++ build tools with winget if they are missing (then asks to be run again). It clones or updates main into %USERPROFILE%\familiar-play (or %FAMILIAR_PLAY_DIR%), builds with the newest Visual Studio that has the C++ tools (Visual Studio 2019 is fine, and is used when a 2022 install lacks C++), and starts the game. The first build fetches and builds Strata and SDL3 and takes a few minutes; later runs only rebuild what changed. Extra arguments go to the game, for example play-familiar.bat --seed 7 or play-familiar.bat --tour.

By hand, from a Developer or plain command prompt:

cmake -S . -B build -A x64 -DFAMILIAR_BUILD_TESTS=OFF
cmake --build build --config Release --parallel --target familiar
build\Release\familiar.exe

Released versions also come as downloads for Windows, Linux and the browser on the releases page, built by .github/workflows/release.yml (docs/RELEASING.md).

Saves and the autopilot

The desktop game continues where you left off: it saves every two minutes of play, on F5 and when you quit, and F9 loads the last save (--fresh starts a new night, --slot DIR saves elsewhere). Saves go to %APPDATA%\Familiar\default on Windows and ~/.local/share/familiar/default elsewhere. In the browser the same saves are kept in the browser (IndexedDB), also when the page is closed or hidden.

A save is checksummed (SHA-256) and versioned, and the save it replaces is kept. A save with any byte damaged is refused with a message and the previous save loads instead; a damaged save is set aside as familiar.save.damaged, never deleted. Saves from every earlier format keep loading: tests/fixtures holds one of each, and the tests load them. See src/save/save.h.

familiar --autopilot lets the autopilot play the whole night, from choosing a costume to Smoke going home at midnight; familiar --headless --autopilot plays it without a window and checks it ends on the pinned fingerprint (CI runs it with --slot, saving and reloading at every step). See src/sim/autopilot.h for its route.

Sound

Every sound is synthesised as the game runs; no recordings ship with it (src/audio): the wind and dry leaves, the creek, an owl after dark, footsteps on leaves, the road and porch boards, knocks and doors, candy in the bag, the cat's meow, Smoke's purr, latches, a match for each lantern, the cider in the pot, and the church clock striking the hours (twelve at midnight). M (or the page's Sound button) turns it off and on, and the game remembers. In a browser the sound starts with the first tap or click, as browsers (iOS Safari especially) require. The sound card is driven through miniaudio 0.11.25 (public domain or MIT No Attribution, third_party/miniaudio/).

The loading shell

The page loads behind the Strata web kit's loading shell (web/strata-kit/strata-loader.js, vendored from Strata at the commit in web/strata-kit/PIN; web/strata-kit/update.sh <sha> re-vendors it). It shows the page's own colours (no trailer or poster exists yet; add poster and trailer to the StrataBoot.start call in web/shell.html when they do) and real progress with the size ("0.5 of 1.3 MB"). The loader streams the .wasm and hands its bytes to the engine, so nothing downloads twice. If Familiar can't run (no WebGL 2, the renderer fails, the engine stops, a lost WebGL context does not come back), the shell says why, with a link to more games. A device that draws under 12 frames a second is offered that link without losing the game (not in automated browsers or ?bench runs).

web/strata-boot.js bridges this classic (non-MODULARIZE) build to the loader: emcc's script tag sits inert in <template id="strata-glue">, the bridge starts it, and the engine waits in Module.instantiateWasm for the loader's bytes. After each link, web/strata_page.cmake puts the loader and the bridge inline in the page (so the site is still the same three files) and stamps the download's size on the template, because the arcade compresses on the fly and sends no Content-Length.

Licence

MIT; see LICENSE.