O

[Morgan]

I and 4 others (Jessy, Catie, Alex, Scott) entered an Ohio contest for a game that requires no instructions or text of any kind. The deadline was today, and we made it.

It was a learning project: me learning Unity better, and the others learning Blender for the first time. I did the programming and sound effects, Jessy did the music, Catie did 2D art, and all of us did level design. (I used LightWave to crank out the city level in about 2.5 hours.) It was collaborative, but mainly via Internet–we met only once for planning/concept discussion.

So what can 5 people working separately do on a tight deadline WHILE learning the tools?

Here’s “O” version 1.0:

http://adamsi.com/morgan/contest/o.html

(Hit Space-Return to cheat and skip levels if you are extremely lame )

We’ll keep enhancing it now that the contest is over. Planned improvements:

• Tweak the timing and difficulty

• Mute sound during pause (click)

• Standalones

• More optimization (3D polys especially)

• Various visual details to tweak (smoothing angles etc.)

• Pinball flippers that animate

• More custom ball shapes

• Tweaks to jungle level geometry (spider occasionally gets stuck in small openings)

• Dress up city with more building variety, tweak what the buildings hide/don’t hide

• Make orange city bumpers work AS bumpers (and shaped like hovercars instead of just round), and make the “doors” in city bump the ball back out

• Make city walls higher and less dangerous, probably overall larger city relative to ball

• Make ramp at end of city shallower, so goal can be to get to the top instead of just get onto the ramp; and decorate the final disc as a moon with raised craters

• Misc. bump maps and textures

• Extend final level further (darned deadlines!) possibly with doors that are opened by switches

• More levels? Probably!

• Maybe more sound work

• Maybe let the “distant floor” drift a bit with the camera

• Enhance the spark/explode effects

• More testing!

• Maybe some Pro effects someday?

• Ultimate shareware release?

Enjoy.

[anon_51268168]

Nice job! I especially enjoyed the sound effects, music, level 2 ball, and the way you communicated the time limit.

How long was the contest?

-Jon

[Morgan]

2 months, then extended to get more entrants–but it didn’t help: between illnesses and day jobs, we ended up doing much of the work very late. As in the last 2 days :o

Put it this way: the first level (Alex’s pinball) was completed a week ago–but the programming to run it was not done. The last to be added (mine–the barely-tested city) was STARTED this afternoon.

I like the spider too–I wanted to make a robot or something for my level’s ball, but there was no time.

I’ve always liked the idea of hand art combined with 3D, and level 2 (Jessy and Catie’s) has a very unusual style that I like. Low polycount, high artwork–kind of surreal.

The last level (Scott’s black hole) can be done in about 3 seconds! I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw the “speed run” technique demonstrated.

[taumel]

I like the music a lot!

What i dislike is the steering of the whole thing. Unplayable in windowed mode and still not great in fullscreen.

Hmm was there much to program? ;O)

[NicholasFrancis]

Ahh, Taumel - your precise and constructive criticism is always such a joy to behold.

[taumel]

Well, i dunno where i was unprecise. If you’ve played it once it should be quite obvious.

By the way i had some problems with the second level as the spider got stuck several times between a block and the wall so i couldn’t move it again.

Adding a precise screenshot…

[Eric5h5]

I played it and it’s obvious the steering is just about perfect; it’s similar to something like Neverball but I think better because the camera doesn’t go all over the place. Maybe you need to clean your mouse? Or get better at the game?

Anyway, very nice, a few small glitches at noted but otherwise quite polished.

–Eric

[David-Helgason]

Works like a charm with a high framerate and smooth controls on this PowerBook 1.6Ghz.

It’s such a sweet thing. My only misgiving is that a ball game that doesn’t allow me to hit stuff seems… wrong

d.

[anon_87805536]

I got stuck on the same block.

[anon_14087696]

Love it! SImple and fun. Make it a widget

[aaronsullivan]

Great work! I’m not usually that excited by marble games like this, but you struck a good balance here and I played the whole way through.

You should follow up with Taumel because he is obviously having some anomalous behavior from his game. It worked perfectly on my old G4 1Ghz. Control is great. It took a couple minutes to get used to the “flat” angle. Tilting all the way towards the player seems a bit unnatural for some reason, but after a couple tries I didn’t notice much.

Highlights: Music/mood, Tiger maze, sparks of imminent death, the first stage.

You’ll definitely need a timed result to be recorded (even if the timer doesn’t show up during play) because I found the first stage fun to replay over and over and I’d like to see if I could improve my time. There’s even a shortcut or two you can take on the city level by bouncing high enough.

[taumel]

You should follow up with Taumel because he is obviously having some anomalous behavior from his game.
<<<

No i don’t think so. I do have some abnormal behaviours with the textures as they are flashing sometimes but the in my opinion not so well done steering isn’t a abnormal behaviour.

More >>>precisely<<< ;O) for windowed mode i would say it is a problem with that the radius where i can act is a too small. Secondly it’s simply irritating that he icons in my dock scale up and down depending on the cursors position (would be nice to be able to set the mousepos).

In both modes i feel that the steering is just a little bit too fungous. There is no possibility to move the camera although you sometimes run in situation where it would be needed.

As for the…nah i will stop better now… :O)

[forestjohnson]

I really like it! I never could get up the ramp at the end of level 3 but I got it after a few tries simply by touching the side of the ramp. That was pretty annoying but the rest of it was great in my opinion. I love the textures on level 2

[bigkahuna]

FANTASTIC! Well executed, great music, nice graphics, excellent use of physics, great game play. My favorite was the “spider” level. You’ve got a winner here.

[Morgan]

Thanks for the feedback and testing!

I don’t take taumel’s comment too hard: like Mikey in the cereal ad “he hates everything!” :lol:

And thanks for the screenshot: we plan a few tweaks for that very reason–it results from enlarging the spider for visibility. There are at least 2 or 3 places where the spider can get stuck, although it’s not hard to avoid those spots. As far the camera blocking things, that’s really only a problem in two places in the city, which as I say will have the buildings adjusted for that reason. (Actually, one of the “blind spots” I like and may keep for the challenge: right before the blue bridge you have a choice to go back or front. Front has the advantage.)

I agree about the Dock (or in my case Exposé corners): the game should really be played fullscreen, and will default to that as a standalone. I wouldn’t say it’s “unplayable” to have a visible pointer, but it is annoying. Still, I can understand why a Web plugin is not allowed to hijack your mouse nor auto-enter fullscreen. (I’d like it to be able to auto-LEAVE fullscreen from a script though.)

Games are subjective so you can’t please everyone, but steering is one of the things that a lot of care went into and I’m very happy with–even compared to, say, Neverball which I find pretty maddening. I’m glad you’re not experiencing a bug at least! Thanks for the feedback/encouragement. I’m not sure what “fungous” means :o but the radius (meaning how far you can tilt?) is the same in any screen mode. (Radius meaning view width varies with screen width.)

“Hidden” feature: mouse wheel to dolly in (just for fun) or out (might actually help).

cgoran: good idea–it would make a nice widget. Or a series of 1-level widgets maybe.

aaronsullivan: I agree about timing and replays–we’ve talked about shortening the “fuse” on every cycle of levels when you go back to the first. We also talked about a menu where you just pick any one level to play, and they don’t go in order at all. More casual, but maybe more fun? Maybe that will depend on how many levels we end up with.

We could even add literal best times: now that the contest is over the “no text” rule could be lifted.

You’re right that finding “level” is a challenge: our camera is neither straight-horizontal, nor top-down. I added a grid “floor” that seems to make that clear enough, though, and I like the unusual perspective. It’s “yet another” marble game, but at least we went in some other directions I like that it’s different–but different is always hard to accept at first play. It’s inspired, as you might imagine, by the toys with the little BBs inside.

Yoggy: The ramp on level 3 is a high-priority fix: it’s too steep. That whole level went through zero dev cycles: it was built in LightWave all at once, exported to Unity, and there was no time to tweak! So to make the deadline, I made the bottom of the ramp the goal instead of the top You actually can get half way up, which is intentionally tricky, and win that way. But the whole “moon disc” will be made wider so the ramp can be longer and more gradual. Then the orange bowl-shaped goal is lined with “bumper material” so the ball will, in theory, do a little victory dance.

Alpha complete, now time to polish! I can already see how helpful outside feedback will be. Thanks for the comments.

[nickavv]

This game rocks socks. I died a couple of times near the end of level three and eventually gave up, but I love the music, sfx, level design, control, concept, and all that rest of it. Kinda reminds me of a SNES game that I forget the name of. Nice game you made here. It’ll win for sure.

[Joe_ByDesign]

yeah, just played it. great fun, simple to learn, hard to master. i like the “no numeric timer” approach. music is surreal and fun.

great work!

[taumel]

I don’t take taumel’s comment too hard: like Mikey in the cereal ad “he hates everything!”
<<<

Wasn’t meant as an offensive. I generally tend to write nothing when i dislike something but in this case i wrote a comment as i liked the music a lot. But you know for sure the best whos critics to ignore and which you want to hear. :O)

[pete_1]

cool one morgan (and the rest of the team)! hope you win!