I learned a lot about how Unity works doing this. Starting from the incredibly basic Roll-A-Ball tutorial provided by the Unity team, I added a jump (which didn’t make it into the release version, but which I am quite pleased with nevertheless – if I end up creating a more complete and sellable version of the game it may find its way back in), then added an advanced camera and gravity beam. Most of the development time went into implementing and tweaking these effects, and I’m very pleased with the overall feel of it now, though certain aspects, such as the simple “X” beam cursor and the occasionally clumsy camera, could use improvement. The game is unfortunately still rather unoptimized – I’m unused to 3d optimization in general, and also more specifically unused to optimization in Unity, and also most of the few things I do know about optimization have to do with ensuring that the game doesn’t render things the player doesn’t need to see – which, in this game, is honestly not very many things, since movement speed can be so fast and can change very quickly the player really needs to be aware of where all the platforms are at all times. That’s one reason I wanted to make the player character reflective, so that you have some idea what’s around you even if you’re not looking in that direction. Unfortunately, because the character is reflective that means even the parts of the level you’re not looking at need to be rendered, so it really does affect the performance.
So, what did I learn from this project? What went right and what went wrong? About halfway through, I was imagining a game with approximately the same gameplay but set inside a giant office or other mundane room. This would have been difficult to do, because I have very little experience creating a realistic 3d space, so eventually I decided to make a more abstract “cyberspace” world. This helped me create a simple level quickly, since I could really just throw together whatever geometry seemed interesting without any concern as to creating textures or ensuring everything was to scale, and also allowed me to create a very open space where the player could do almost anything with the gravity beams. I knew early on that I wanted the player to be a glass sphere which shattered on hard impacts, partially inspired by Marble Madness. It took me quite a while to figure out how to create the shattering effect – I eventually found code to create something along the lines of what I needed, but had to modify it slightly but significantly to suit my purposes. I’m pleased with the final shattering effect, though it sometimes renders in ways I don’t expect.
I tend to think of music creation as coming fairly quickly and easily to me, but it was actually difficult under the time pressure of the last few days of the project. While I like the track I came up with well enough, it’s shorter and simpler and has less production work than I usually like to put into my musical work. I think it’s well suited to the game though, and I haven’t gotten tired of listening to it yet which is a good sign. The sound effects were mostly pulled from freesound.org, though I modified many of them quite significantly, mostly to make the glass sound a bit more musical when it struck or rolled.
All in all, I’m quite satisfied. It might not be the most ambitious project, it might not have a ton of content, but I do feel it offers something unique and that I have executed it to a reasonable level of quality. I may revisit this project sometime next year and try to develop it into a complete game, which would involve adding a bunch of new levels, leaderboards, and ideally some sort of head-to-head racing mode.
For December, I’d like to try to patch up a weakness of mine: The same way as P1aySpace ZER0 was an opportunity to learn Unity, I would like to take this opportunity to learn to create the kind of realistic 3d space I opted out of making for this project. I’m not sure yet what kind of game I would be setting in that environment, though I have a few ideas — first I want to plan out and construct this space, then I can see how much time I have left, during this very busy month, to build a game into it. Hopefully I will be as pleased with that project as I was with this one.
Oh, before I forget, since this game turned out quite a bit more difficult than I had initially expected it to, here are a few tips:
- Use the repulsor beam. Though going fast is fun and satisfying, you will almost certainly destroy yourself if you don’t use the repulsor to slow yourself down sometimes.
- Don’t worry if you miss a gate. Until you get down to the last couple of gates, missing one usually sets you on a trajectory to hit another. Every missed platform is an opportunity to swing around and fly in a different direction.
- Rapidfire the beam to climb. Once you’re holding yourself close to an edge with the beam it’s usually possible to climb or swing up, but getting there in the first place requires you to pull yourself up with the beam.
Happy rolling!