Astounding Worlds
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Astounding Worlds is a collection of interconnected 3d environments previously showcased on PanoramicWorlds.com. It's now being rebranded as "Astounding Worlds" not because it's not panorama-based anymore, so much as because HostGator is an evil and utterly broken web host that not only failed to transfer the domain out but would not even let me renew it. So now the domain name is AstoundingWorlds.com and the game's title has changed along with the change in the domain name.
There are a few simple puzzles in some areas but for the most part, this is classifiable as 'walking sim/artgame' rather than a full-fledged first-person adventure game. Essentially, it's a showcase for many of my creative 3d world art ideas.
VERSIONS PLANNED INCLUDE:
-FREE VERSION, AD SUPPORTED. Has ads and links embedded for some of my paid projects online, and some third-party ads for major stores, all on the loading screens between levels.
Ads won't intrude on gameplay otherwise, no ads inside any of the levels. The main menu will have a link promoting the ad-free variant.
-PAID VERSION, entirely ad-free, on this page and posted on other venues over time.
BOTH VERSIONS WILL BE OUTPUT FOR WINDOWS first, then Mac, Linux, and [a bit later] Android.
An initial release is coming soon* (now looks like fall 2026) even though I know I am months, even years, late I am still working on this and I apologize for the delays. It's not far off now, though. It's been a complicated rotation through a ton of different project efforts.
The premium [ad-free] version is going to be priced at $1.45 following launch, or $1.29 prior to release, unless bought during a major bundle sale, which I tend to have about 8 times per year. Considering the 90+% off bundles that sometimes occur here, it's pretty clear that at least a dozen people already have essentially preordered the full 'HD' ad-free version at a price of approximately ten cents, whether they thought much about the fact that they did that or not.
I still aim to release a viable initial version as soon as a few more bugs are fixed.
The project will include sixteen worlds at launch... as long as the game is generating any sort of reasonable revenue, it'll continue to be periodically updated.
NEXT BIG SALE: LABOR DAY 2026.
At that time, all 5000+ existing asset files plus all future updates to those, and indie games when they release, bundled for under $2.
Unity as game engine - I am using Unity to release this across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux & Android. In general, I would recommend a desktop or laptop with at least 2gb ram, a few free gb of storage space, and a reasonably modern OS variant, for those who want to run it well. This said, the graphics settings will be somewhat scalable within the in-game menus.
I hesitate to call it a 'walking sim' as that subcategory is oft-derided, but it essentially is for now. There are some simple puzzles, now and then, but they're not frequent, many worlds won't have them, and there may be story elements but they're generally 'episodic' and self-contained things attached to specific worlds. The open-ended nature of this means it is difficult to build a cohesive singular story as there is no defined ending point, but it is and will be - if nothing else - very pretty to look at and explore and listen to. You will, I hope, appreciate the environment art at least, and the open-ended nature of exploring it with few arbitrary obstacles.
There are some visually impressive ideas I have here and if my games are going at all well on itch.io or later, Steam, those will be accelerated as I shift decisively to full-time game dev work!
If we think of this in terms of what would be involved to keep this actively expanding, it isn't a lot. $250-500 a year here would fully justify a steady flow of updates across many different areas. Given current patterns I think I am already about 35% of the way there on this specific project. Which, considering this hasn't even launched yet, is extremely encouraging.
WHAT IF I BOUGHT THIS ALREADY, PRE-LAUNCH?
If you did... thank you. I know many people got this as a part of a larger stock-media and gaming bundle, during my last few sales. If you did, I will include your itch.IO username in the game credits menu... and visible on a supporters plaque in a garden inside one of the worlds. This will of course now be massive as the number of bundle purchases has absolutely exploded over 2025-2026. If you don't want the username there let me know.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $1 USD. You will get access to the following files when they are released:
Comments
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By the way, for anyone asking:
I will bundle an offline version of 'Crowdsourced Adventure' in with this so that will be two adventure art games, for the price of one on itch, both of them likely to expand steadily over time. For those curious, the sites of both projects recently saw updates around 2024.
www.AstoundingWorlds.com
www.CrowdsourcedAdventure.com
Both of these were severely delayed between a long list of things from freelance gigs and side projects unrelated to itch, shops like Etsy, and itch asset pack development. Good news is my financial and time situations have both improved as this itch profile's taken off Freelancing and other shops helped raise funding at the cost of siphoning off productive time and it's increasingly clear the time's the valuable thing. I now have enough cash in place to get things done, just need to do the work that remains unifinished on various projects.
The games - if bought here or on Steam - will expand faster if people are actually buying for offline play but I won't be surprised if most don't do so.
After all, they'll be playable online too output to an HTML5 WebGL format.
And that version's great in its own way but visuals are slightly more compressed to run in the limited memory of a browser window. Not that it'd be an obvious detail loss, as the fact that it is run in browser often limits the size of the game to under 50% of a total screen area... an in browser window of roughly 720*560 px. with some narrow ads around the edges and browser trim along the top. Graphics are in theory 16x the quality in offline (Windows) form, designed to look good on a 1080p screen. That is, double resolution in width and height, and an equally vast 4-fold diffence in compression, where offline textures are uncompressed and online uses a variant of DXT compression to drop memory use and filesize to 1/4 at the cost of a certain level of not-so-obvious blurriness.
Consider: WebGL on browsers forces a limit of 1gb memory use for both the downloaded files and the running app. It's a tough limit to stay within, long term, but I have done some tests as of 2026 that demonstrate a dynamic loading, offloading of level files can function in WebGL. Typical world size across both projects would be 100mb [WebGL] and 400-500 mb standalone / offline.
Windows offline system requirements?
I would advise a system with 8gb ram, and ideally 50gb free space for both games on your hard drive. Won't take even 1/3 that amount at first but I am optimistically planning on a series of big updates over time on both, so... by end of 2027, the two of them together might have an install footprint that really is getting that big.