I don't like following themes perfectly, so when I heard the theme, I started thinking of tons of puns to make a funny game. I thought of stuff like Combine (tractor) toward incompatible genres, but decided that would be boring. Instead I thought of two things that were incompatible. I decided to go with oil and water. I wanted to make a puzzle game around it, so I decided to make a game moving around liquid metal inside water (magnetically). I mainly went with this idea because I really wanted to try making some fluid physics. It was annoying at times, because I did a lot new (played around with shader code etc), but I learned a lot.

How to play

The instructions can be found on screen as well.

To play, click on the screen to repel the liquid away, try to guide it into the holes.

There are two progress bars on the side, one tells you how much liquid you have left to push out, and the other tells you how much longer you can hold the mouse (you have a limit to make it difficult)

Don't hit into red areas.

Good luck!

How is this made

This is made with Lib-GDX, and the physics is done with Box-2D. The liquid is actually a bunch of circles simulated in the physics engine. To make it look like liquid, I blue the whole image a bunch of times in a shader to blend the particles together, then use a shader to not display pixels with a certain darkness, and display other pixels at their full brightness. (The source code is available if you would like to take a look at how it is done)

It might sound easy to implement (I thought it would be), but as always, I ran into so many issues trying to do so. But luckily, the game turned out great!

Screenshots

Gif