Lasso Sister - a 3D western where you rope outlaws from 30 m and drag them to jail (Three.js, free)

[oreumgames]

Hi all,

Lasso Sister is a third-person 3D western. You are a bounty hunter with a rope and no gun. Pick one of thirteen wanted posters, ride out to the hideout, chase the outlaw down, hold Space to spin the lasso and release to throw it up to 30 metres. Caught outlaws are dragged behind your horse, three in a line, to the jail. Drag one more than 80 metres and the rope slips, and you have to chase on foot by mashing Space and win a fistfight. After the thirteenth there is an ending, a jailbreak, and all thirteen again with doubled bounties. English and Korean, PC and landscape phones.

Play (free, no sign-up): oreumgames.com/en/games/lasso

Tech, since this is a dev forum: Three.js with plain JS files on top, no engine. All fourteen people are GLB models from an AI mesh generator, and only four came with a skeleton. The rest, including the hero, were rigged in Blender from a script: move the joints of an existing Mixamo-style skeleton into the new body, auto-weight a voxel-remeshed proxy, and transfer the weights to the original mesh, so the clips we already had retarget onto all of them. None of them had finger bones, so a fist is a morph target baked into each GLB, 10 to 40 KB each, switched on during fights. Quantizing vertex attributes took the twelve outlaw models from 15 MB to 9.9 MB without changing the look. The pony has 13 bones and its walk and gallop are driven in code rather than from clips.

The catch moment is where most of the feel went. When the loop lands the game runs at 0.15x for half a second while the camera keeps real time, the FOV pulls from 50 to about 44, the screen edges flash, and the loop climbs from the boots to the chest over 0.26 s before the rope goes taut. The sounds are Pixabay recordings, a whip crack and a rope tightening, embedded as base64 so the game still opens from a double-clicked HTML file. Fleeing outlaws steer by probing 16 directions up to 16 m every 0.25 s in 1.5 m steps and scoring open distance; coarser steps let them skip a thin fence, which is how the boss ended up running into a wall. Mesa collision was ovals at first and the outlaws disappeared into the cliffs, so now each mesa's boundary is sampled from the mesh at 34 angles where the surface rises more than 0.6 m.

The performance lesson was about first draws. Before release the frame-time log showed three hitches over 0.1 s: the town's first draw right after start, the destination arrow's first draw after picking a poster (up to 1 s), and the first appearance of each outlaw model (0.56 s). All three were materials and geometry being uploaded on first use, so now the loader draws them once off-screen before the title appears. After that the play, ending and jailbreak logs show zero frames over 0.1 s on an Intel Iris Xe laptop.

Made by a very small indie team in Korea.

One thing I would like to hear: on your phone, does the throw still feel readable at 30 m, and does the chase stay smooth with three outlaws on the rope?

Thanks for playing!

[manuelcondect]

Played through to the first chase: took the $50 poster, rode out and Bad Attitude bolted on me. On the way out the waypoint arrow was sitting behind me at 15 m so I rode the wrong way for a while until I worked out the arrows are screen relative and A/D turns the camera, and then I wedged the horse in the gap between the buildings next to the bank and could only get out with the down arrow. With the lasso I held Space at about 25 m in the open, the loop flew, and it landed as rings on the sand with nothing to tell me whether the ring was still sliding out or already on its way back, so my release was a guess and I missed every time - am I meant to time the ring on the ground, or is a charge cue supposed to show up somewhere?

[PeanutButterAddict]

Annoying to keep running back after losing horses to hidden camera, due to how slow walking is and how far away he is. 
Otherwise the game play idea is pretty good and fun. 
Would need a lot of work and polish to improve it.