All Ways Down by noddingTortoise
All - Ways - Down is a simple two button puzzle game, where the aim of the game is to try and navigate the level, collecting all of the growth pellets along the way. The more pellets you collect the more the ball grows, getting larger and heavier, and thus harder to control. When the player collects all of the pellets on the level they can then move to the next by hitting the goal button, but you will have to get to it first.
The player doesn't move the ball directly, instead the player controls the game using just two buttons, 'a' and 'd', which rotate the level left and right respectively, and so the player must rely on the always downward force of gravity to move about.
This game was made in under 3 days and has a total of 20 levels.
Controls:
a : rotate left.
d : rotate right.
The player doesn't move the ball directly, instead the player controls the game using just two buttons, 'a' and 'd', which rotate the level left and right respectively, and so the player must rely on the always downward force of gravity to move about.
This game was made in under 3 days and has a total of 20 levels.
Controls:
a : rotate left.
d : rotate right.
Ratings
| Coolness | 49% | 1391 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.49 | 358 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.44 | 295 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 2.80 | 820 |
| Humor(Jam) | 1.69 | 844 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.59 | 199 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.19 | 535 |
| Theme(Jam) | 4.20 | 94 |
Congrats for this game.
The music fits the movement of the ball, it's very smooth and gentle.
Great job!
Overall, this is a good project. Well done ++
Spinning to try and get the ball through at the last moment was really fun, so I feel focusing your game towards being more dynamic could help make the most of that!
But there is one big problem here. One that I'm surprised not to see in the comments already.
You are simply transforming the local coordinates of the *room*. It does not change the relative movement vectors for the *ball* in its local coordinates. There's no need to have this smoothed out trajectory business when turning.
Consider a short scenario without collisions. If a ball goes up at t=0, and there's a rotation at t=t_r, then it'd damn well keep going up (from the camera's perspective) at t>t_r. The direction of the gravity in the ball's coordinates doesn't change either! Which means the ball doesn't start swerving right/left or doing those bonkers loop-de-loops visually, even if one did keep spinning the room around. The way you're doing it now is as if the ball is collecting extra momentum from the rotation itself, but there's no interaction to cause that, which fucks with the player's brain.
This is a big deal because it causes the result of your input to be less intuitive and harder to predict than it needs to be. Also there are some additional concerns with the floatiness (common to Unity games because of default physics I guess?) and the lack of elasticity of the ball.
@RedBricksStudio
@RockhopperGames
The ball being slow was partially a design choice, as I wanted the ball to start by feeling light and for the player to really feel the increase in weight when the ball grows, but not be too heavy at the larger sizes. However, based on feedback I do feel this could be tuned to make the ball go a little faster at smaller sizes, and to be slightly less floaty.
I’m also planning on increasing the size of pickups for the post jam version.
@Jwatt
The local co-ordinates of the room don’t actually change, in fact the level never actually moves :-p
In this instance, the effect is created by rotating the camera, and updating the direction of gravity so that it is always in the downward direction relative to the camera. The rest of the work( i.e the way the ball moves) is then left to the Unity physics engine, which applies the required forces based on the new direction of gravity to all objects. This is why the ball behaves the way it does, and does bonkers loop-de-loops :-D
The reason I chose this method was because of its simple implementation and because I liked the effect of the end result.
But if you've deemed your method to be functional gameplay-wise, then I guess I won't object to it any further. Glad to hear about post-jam updates as well!
Good entry, nice puzzles.