Good point! I like that the suggestion of an eye and a pair of them was enough to suggest companionship / seed the creation of a player-made goal to bring them together. I could make a small level design tweak to make it harder to leave one of the blocks behind - think I should do that? Or is it more interesting if there's a "bad" ending vs a "good" ending to strive for?
Yes, you're right. I'm not sure how I ended up with an old version. I replaced the files while the editor was open so maybe Unity was running off an in-memory cache rather than the files on disc? Very strange. After replacing with template version 2.2 and verifying the version was correct before launching the editor, it's working much better now. Thank you!
Gorgeous illustration! I love the use of rhythm of interaction to communicate the story and feelings. Definitely adding this to my examples to show students of mechanics being used effectively to convey meaning.
That intention definitely shines through, and instantly sets this apart. Particularly the choice to let you exit the level from any checkpoint - great quality of life feature, and way better than tucking it in a menu option.
It did surprise me a bit that the hold down to enter/exit isn't debounced - so if you keep holding, you keep flip-flopping between the two destinations. Not sure if that's specifically to support some mechanics you have in mind, like trying to catch that critter that only spawns when you enter the level?
Absolutely brilliant level design. I love the way you layer your mechanics and then present them in combination. The checkpoint mechanics feel refreshingly generous!
I think I phrased the achievement poorly. It awards for erasing *all* suns, so if you still had more in the corner it won't fire. I'll look at either fixing the wording, or adding a new achievement type that triggers on individual removal.
The APK is yours. :) (Had to ditch the floating point render texture I was using, but I think I was able to adequately compensate elsewhere to still get a pretty smooth look)
Thank you! I'll need to do some experiments - never made a mobile build before, and some of the ways I'm using render textures are probably not super friendly for tiled rendering, but I think some efficiencies are possible...
I've been interested in adding a single player mode, but I'm not sure what would be most interesting there. The same competitive mode but with AI opponents, or some type of objective-based challenge or puzzle? What would you hope to see from a single player version?
Thanks so much! I'm glad you and your friends have been enjoying it!
Now that my teaching is done for the semester, I'm hoping to get back into actively developing this and releasing an expanded version in the future. :)
I'll certainly try! The fast-paced physics gameplay makes it a bit challenging (even the tiniest bit of lag could result in drastically different results) but there may be ways to solve the major issues.
Oh gosh, comments like this make my day! Thank you so much for sharing it! Knowing that folks get enjoyment from playing my games is the most rewarding thing. :D
Keep moving and aim for the trail. As long as a player domino is laying down trail, they can only be toppled by their own trail dominoes hitting them. (If you idle then it becomes possible to just body-check you, as an anti-exploit)
You should just be able to unzip the game and run the executable. You'll get a configuration screen where you can change the graphics quality and input settings - just press "Play!" to start. After that you'll see two dominoes drop onto a table. Use the arrow keys or WASD to control one of them, or the left stick of your gamepad. More players can join using more gamepads. A full control map is included in the zip file, and is also shown in-game if you press Escape.
Thanks Stephanie! I'm working on expanding the game to include features like those. I think there's a lot of ways to make the gameplay deeper and offer more variety. I'd also like to investigate whether I can add a single-player mode of some kind.
If you like, I have an experimental version I'm working on with better match-tracking features - it might help improve the game for video spectating. Private message me on Twitter and I can set you up with a link. (It's not quite ready for a full release yet)
Thanks! And sorry for the trouble there - I'd assumed Unity's built-in control mapping would be enough, but I didn't realize it was missing an option for inverting an axis. I'm working on a fresh build for an upcoming game party, so I'll build in more robust options UI for that version. In the meantime, I can think of a hacky fix: if we can work out what joystick name the controller reports, I can detect that case and invert its input in code. ;) Do you have the Unity editor installed? If so, I can give you a quick little script to get this info. There may also be third-party programs you can run to remap the gamepad - I use one to get DS4s to read like Xbox 360 gamepads in Unity.
Well, I won't give you all the info you'd need to clone my game. ;)
When making your own original game, there are going to be some judgement calls you need to make for yourself, including things like what unit scale and physics behaviour feels right to you.
Yes, it is indeed built on Unity. I used very nearly the default soft shadow settings - the only changes I made were to decrease the shadow strength to 0.72 so they're a bit more transparent and increase the intensity of the light to 3.2 (my normal mapped materials were rendering darker than I wanted, and in a jam's time constraints it was faster to blow out the light than troubleshoot what was causing this) ;)
It might be because I have a small confined scene with a very shallow depth range, so the shadow map's resolution isn't stretched thin across a huge volume. I also have relatively few curved or thin pointy shapes to reveal jaggies from aliasing, and the camera rarely gets super close to a surface without the depth of field blurring away artifacts that might otherwise be visible.
If you're having trouble in your Unity project, you can often get good advice over at gamedev.stackexchange.com - just be sure to ask a clear and specific question, including a description of what you've tried, examples of the results, and a clear indication of what bits you want to change/improve.
It doesn't look like that will help, unfortunately. That's an IDE for coding web apps from scratch - at present, I don't see myself re-coding the game and all of the Unity engine features I'm using. ;) I'll keep looking into other options.
Interesting suggestion! I hadn't thought about Chromebook as a platform. Information about distributing Unity games for Chromebook seems a bit sparse, and what I'm finding is discouraging - do you have any tips on where I can find more information?
Updated with dynamic controls assignment, which should let you play with any combination of (up to 3) keyboard and gamepad players (up to a total of 6). Whatever input you use first automatically maps to player 1, the next to player 2, the next to player 3 (spawned on demand), and so on.
Please let me know how this works for you. :)
Also, I'm digging "Capture the Marble" - I've been itching to try getting one of those swirly glass marbles in. Initially I was thinking of it as a hazard, but now I'm considering "Marble Soccer" or other uses... Stay tuned for further experiments over the next month!
Good idea, I'll try to incorporate more sophisticated controls options in the next build.
There will be some imbalance between the arrow keys and gamepad players (the full 360° angle control of an analog stick is a big benefit), but you can resolve that part in meatspace by rotating controllers if you wanted to play tournament-style. ;)
