Asuna
"A vibrant world of beautiful biomes. Explore, discover, create."
- Asuna's tagline on ContentDB
Asuna is a free and open-source game developed for Luanti and released by EmptyStar. The game is primarily a collection of various (mostly unrelated) mods for Luanti that is combined into a single game (not dissimilar to "modpacks" in Minecraft) with heavy focus on exploration and world generation.
The game is based on Minetest Game (historically the base game typically used to build Luanti games), and it is designed to be compatible with mods designed for Minetest Game. Luanti ContentDB tagged the game as Minetest Game Improved.
Installation
As with Mineclonia, we installed the game directly from Luanti. The installation process went well, though the download took a while.
Asuna is rather heavy for a Luanti game. Its download size is 85.6 MB, and the whole game took 95.8 MB of our phone storage (not including the Luanti application itself or any worlds we needed to create afterwards).
Gameplay
For the most part, Asuna's gameplay mostly resembles Minetest Game but with many additions on top of it. The game is primarily focused around exploring the world with over 60 biomes to explore, over 100 plants to discover, and thousands of items and nodes (or blocks) to find.
As with Minetest Game, you can place and break almost anything in the game (though you need to have the block or tools in your inventory if creative mode is disabled). If enable damage is enabled, you will also need to avoid taking too much damage whether by hostile creatures, fall damage, or other possible threats. You will also need to eat (though you cannot starve to death unless starvation is enabled in the game settings). The game has no true goals for the player, though it is clearly designed with exploration and nature in mind.
Unfortunately, as the game is composed of many unrelated mods combined into one package, Asuna's design direction can sometime seem unconnected and unrelated. The game still flows well overall, but there are some telltale signs that the game is a collection of disjointed ideas rather than being designed with one vision in mind.
Compared to Minecraft, Asuna is very different and is mostly trying to be its own thing, though both games have some similarities as they belong in the same genre (though, they are about as similar as two shooter games are with each other).
From an interview we conducted, our respondent said that the game is similar to Minecraft, but it feels much more alive due to the amount of unique biomes and plants available. There are also features in Asuna which adds to the experience such as the ability to climb leaves, use teleporter, and the design of the custom structures. Additionally, we heard from the interview that the game is pretty fun to explore, and it is fun to discover new things in the game. The game is not too difficult to play unless when mining for rarer ores like iron and diamond.
Performance-wise, the game runs poorly on weaker hardware. It takes minutes to load the game on low-end Android phones, and the game is frequently unresponsive, causing delays when placing and breaking blocks or opening and moving the inventory. The world also generates rather slowly, and it is often not loaded in time before the player reaches the unloaded area.
Sadly, the performance of the game ruins the experience for us, though the game might run better on better phones or on desktop (alternatively, you can also run the game server on desktop and then join said server on phone for better performance, though it is still not guaranteed).
Graphics
The graphics design of the game is rather interesting. The game is mostly designed to be natural and realistic, and it achieves that rather well. Our respondent said, "The game is realistic but not too realistic. I would say it is good." The interviewee noted that the appearance of stone, bricks, plants, and bushes in the game is appealing because they look realistic and not too blocky. However, the biggest praise was given to the animal models and textures because it looks realistic while also cute at the same time. This focus on realism should serve the game's exploration and nature theme well.
The art quality of the game is overall great, but the art direction can sometimes be inconsistent and disjointed. This is a side effect of the game being made of multiple mods with their own art directions.
The user interface of the game are the same as the default one for Luanti. It is passable but not notable. The inventory menu in the game uses sfinv, which is very simple and functional but not too well-designed. Because of the many features added into the game, the tab bar on the top of the inventory screen often look crowded, though this can be remedied by installing inventory menu mods which are usually compatible with the game.
Audio
The sound effects design of Asuna is overall fairly good. Many things in the game such as walking, placing blocks, and breaking blocks. Regarding the sound effects, our interviewee said, "It is good, but the achievement sound feels scary."
Asuna also has music playing in the background. Our respondent said that the music is relaxing, calm and soothing, making it perfect for exploration especially at night. However, during our testing and interview, the music does not seem to play constantly; it would play once for a few minutes and then stopped without resuming, as mentioned by our respondent during the interview. Our respondent had to turn the music on manually in the inventory menu to have it play again.
Multiplayer
As with most Luanti games, players can play multiplayer in Asuna through the local network and on public servers. The process should be the same as playing multiplayer in any other Luanti games (see our coverage of Luanti for more details).
However, from our experience, the performance in multiplayer can be quite hit-and-miss. The game lagged frequently, especially the server, causing the game to have a delay in registering placing and breaking blocks. The loading process for multiplayer is even slower as the game had to download all the resources on top of loading them into the game, creating very long delays in multiplayer. Overall, multiplayer can work but performance issues are frequent without a powerful device and/or a strong network connection.
Aside from the performance issues, everything seems to work exactly as expected when playing Asuna, and most features in the game has been designed to accommodate multiplayer game.
Customizability
As Asuna is run with Luanti, you can customize quite a lot of things. You can read our coverage on Luanti for more details on the options within Luanti. However, Asuna also adds quite a few additional settings on top of Luanti's default settings. Most of these settings are related to enabling or disabling features in the game, such as starvation, research mechanic, menagerie (animals), weather, and so on. You can also change some game mechanics, such as bones mode, in the settings.
In game, you can also choose your appearance ("skin") out of a selection of skins available in the game. You cannot customize the skin beyond choosing one of a few presets, and you cannot add your own skins without using mods (which may not always work) or modifying the game files directly (which requires quite a lot of technical skills and may be out of reach for most people).
The bike in this image are added through a mod (link)
As with many Luanti games, you can also install additional mods and texture packs easily from within the game itself. Our respondent cited this as one of the game's main advantage. As Asuna is built on top of and maintains compatibility with Minetest Game, most mods designed for Luanti should (but not always) be compatible with Asuna, giving the game a vast possibility for modding. However, adding additional mods or texture packs into the game may exacerbate the game's already-existing performance problem.
Verdict
Asuna is a rather interesting attempt at creating an exploration-centric spin on the voxel-sandbox type games. Given these type of games usually put exploration as one of their core gimmick in the first place, creating an exploration-centric voxel game is certainly a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, this focus is indirectly this game's biggest weakness: the large amount of content needed for exploration means the game loads and runs really poorly. However, with a sufficiently-powerful enough phone (or with a desktop PC), the game may provide a pretty great experience.
This game is certainly perfect for those interested in voxel sandbox games with many natural things and places to explore.
External Links
- ContentDB - Luanti ContentDB entry for the game
- Github - The game's source code
- Automobiles Pack - The automobiles mod featured in the above screenshot
- sfinv - An inventory menu mod mentioned in the game
- Minetest Game - The game Asuna is based on
