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Alchemist

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 22, 2004
141
102
UK
Hi All,

I am trying to remember the name of an old Mac game I used to play. It was incredibly relaxing... arguably the most relaxing game I have ever played. Perhaps you can help if I can describe it?

There was no discernible aim as far as I could make out. 'You' were essentially just the camera point of view, which you could move around in 3D space using the arrow keys. The world you were in was essentially a 3D space in which a gentle gravity pervaded. As such, while you could move left and right, forwards and (I think) backwards too, you would always drop towards the ground. The otherwise minimalist black space was populated by translucent tiles which when you landed on them would impart a bounce, or a little bit of upward momentum, and would play a musical note. The tiles were often arranged in sequences, for example in the shape of a spiral staircase, and with a little bit of skill you could propel yourself up through this sequence of tiles, gaining height and also, with each tiles contact, playing a musical note. These often formed a scale or other relaxing sound. At the top of the sequence of tiles (say the spiral in this case) your upward energy would eventually give way to gravity and you'd start to descend.

Like I say, there was no specific aim, but it seemed to be a procedurally generated game with a new level every day. I think it downloaded from the internet. It was EXTREMELY relaxing and I loved it. I'd place it in time as being somewhere in the 1995-2005 bracket.

Any ideas?!
 
Yep,

But I can't remember playing it with the keyboard.. I defintely used mouse only, and using keyboard to change settings.
Button press would "take you down" and mouse left/right would rotate, mouse front/back would move you front/back... I wished I had a joystick for a iBook G3 back then...

Bouncing off would make music and hitting the spinner would result in fireworks and creating new level...

I was quite sad when they killed it off as when I bought it - it said we own it for life - but it was server based.
For a long time I had a lot of local saved levels and I would come back to it and have a play.. BUT I didn't do a good backup - I lost that drive and - no more Tranquility...

I bought it in 2001 and though it was marvellous. Music was great, and favourite music settings for was Trio (percussions, piano and guitar i think). At the beginning I thought blur mode was difficult, but later I would use blur to get pass harder lvls..

Loved it sober, loved it stoned..
 
Ha, I do remember Tranquility! It was beautiful to play and I spent a lot of evenings after work doing just that. I recall the music being mesmerizing. I played the later iteration.

Another one I played a lot of in the early 90s was Solarian:
 
Yes! I still play this and it's one of the reasons I'm still on Mojave.

Network features don't work, but F7 (random level) and F8 (demo level) still work fine. And you can F5 (save) any random levels you so you can revisit them at your leisure.

Just today I started documenting the definition language that makes up the levels: https://github.com/gingerbeardman/tranquility-levels

My goal is to write my own level generation server to bring back the online aspect of the game. I am locally serving my own manually-edited levels to test this setup. Still a long way to go though!

If you have played the game at any point, saved/cached levels are stored in: ~/Library/Preferences/tranquility
You may have daily levels that were received before the servers went offline.
Look for these before running the game again!

Please share any levels you find, preferably by PR on GitHub or let me know here if that's not possible.

Fun fact: according to the ReadMe.rtfd the "shooting" mechanic was added at the request of Phil Schiller. 🙄
 
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