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[nobody]

Rotational is a love letter to Hexagon. (Download for Windows or Mac)

It's a 1.0 release, but I felt more comfortable posting it here for feedback than on the Announcements board for promotion. If you play for a little bit and give up in frustration, I'd be curious to hear exactly how far you reached. Thanks!

Update: Provisional Linux build. (RC2)
Update: Provisional web-playable build. (v0.1)

[ghoulkid86]

This is great! Love the graphics and sounds. Feels so punishing to have that *smash* in your face/ears whenever you fuck up.
One thing though; is the gameplay supposed to be synced with the music like in Hexagon? Didn't feel like it was. Would've rather liked that..
Anyway, great challenge. Haven't quit out of frustration yet Only 15 secs in though.

[Christoffer]

Pretty cool but desperately needs some obvious indication for when you've cleared a cage since it's really hard to see depth. Maybe just fade it out super quickly, play a sound, make it blink or something.

[nobody]

Those are spot-on critiques. I think I blocked off some avenues of possible solutions by getting attached to certain things. Namely, by shaping the obstacles as cubes, yet the rotation as spherical, there isn't really a precise moment when you've decisively cleared the rim. It's pulling off some barely perceptible tricks to mitigate that, but whether it's at a specific moment safe to start turning depends on exactly where you are in the open face and exactly what direction you're moving off in next.

But I'm not offering this as an excuse, more as an explanation of the wall I kept bumping up against. I think I'm fairly proud of finding plausible solutions to so many of the problems inherent to the concept, but that's one I eventually let go of, hoping people would play long enough to build up a sort of intuitive muscle memory despite the perceptual difficulty.

[Christoffer]

Just a suggestion (and not necessarily a good one), but you could just set a value yourself when it starts to fade out and stops colliding. Most games cheat a lot.
Might be worth a try at least, it may not feel good at all.

[jonbro]

well, you certainly got the hexagon one more play thing locked down. I think it could benefit from the audio continuing on the game over screen, maybe with a low pass filter in place. Like others say, I have some difficulty tracking when I have cleared a cell, and the distance to the next cell. Also some of the cells seem unwinnable. Also, another thing that hexagon has is premade (interesting) patterns. I am not sure if you are doing this or not, because I have only made it to 18seconds. But there was something nice about having these clearly drawn forms coming towards you.

well done over all though.

[nobody]

Just a suggestion (and not necessarily a good one), but you could just set a value yourself when it starts to fade out and stops colliding. Most games cheat a lot.
Might be worth a try at least, it may not feel good at all.

We're totally thinking alike. I've got a little of that going on (and then also mitigating the possibility of feeling like you've passed through a cube by speeding up the shrink rate for that last fraction of a second when the collision detection's already been deactivated), but maybe I should try tuning that up a bit more. It's way better than without any cheating at all (cuts down on the frustration of hitting the rim on your way to the next cube), but there's still a lot of rim-hitting until (hopefully) the distance/timing muscle memory kicks in.

I think it could benefit from the audio continuing on the game over screen, maybe with a low pass filter in place.

Oh, that's a great idea! Without buying Unity Pro I can't apply audio filters, but the game actually already contains a low bit-rate version of the song with all the highend and mids stripped out just so I could do something like that during the 60-second goal sequence. If I end up doing a future update, I'll play around with how that feels on every gameover screen.

Also, another thing that hexagon has is premade (interesting) patterns. I am not sure if you are doing this or not, because I have only made it to 18seconds. But there was something nice about having these clearly drawn forms coming towards you.

Yeah, the first 8 seconds or so are pattern-free, but patterns start kicking in at around that point. I've felt at various times weird about that, but it was in an effort to make a specific pattern be more likely legible to a larger number of people. (I had bigger plans for more complex patterns, but much was thwarted by the fact that overlapping three cubes for more than a split second translated into total perceptual mush.)

[Claw]

This is really fun, and a really crazy/cool idea. I beat the game (well, hit 60 seconds [if that's the real end? ]) and think I have a good handle on it now. Super hexagon is one of my favorite games so this one was right up my alley.

Do some cubes shrink faster than others or start way smaller? I think the double ringed ones are probably twice as fast, but sometimes I'd end up in one that seemed to go super slow by comparison, maybe it was just bigger? And the opposite for some single ringed cubes, seemed to be in it for a split second and die.

I'd take that with a pinch of salt though, I think I just suck at perceiving volume and things in 3 dimensions Really love the game though, great job.

[nobody]

Do some cubes shrink faster than others or start way smaller? I think the double ringed ones are probably twice as fast, but sometimes I'd end up in one that seemed to go super slow by comparison, maybe it was just bigger? And the opposite for some single ringed cubes, seemed to be in it for a split second and die.

Thanks for playing! (I loved Leaf Me Alone, by the way.)

I'm not sure I want to explain it all completely, at least not out in the open/public, but there are two pattern-types whose variants start smaller and shrink faster, and both of those have the doubled rims. But then there's also one pattern-type that doesn't start smaller or shrink faster but which requires a similar but of quick thinking/handling, so those ended up getting the doubled rims as well.

(Oh, and the 45-degree warm-up pattern within the first 8 seconds of every run does start smaller and shrink faster, but doesn't require much quick thinking/handling, so didn't get the doubled rims.)

So the iconography is really about "You better be on your toes for this one! Start moving already!" and not purely about the speed/size.

That said, part of me is really frustrated that any of the cubes are faster/smaller than any of the others, but those patterns otherwise would have required layering more than two or three cubes on the screen at once, which would have -- unfortunately -- resulted in perceptual mush.

If I could figure out a way to cleanly overlap four cubes on screen at once (or even three for any significant duration), there's so much more I could do with this, but -- having failed to discover any solution there -- I decided to give up a bit of purity in exchange for getting to keep the most fun-feeling patterns in the game.

In any case, I'm really pleased to hear you got to 60 seconds!

[paulmcgg]

That said, part of me is really frustrated that any of the cubes are faster/smaller than any of the others, but those patterns otherwise would have required layering more than two or three cubes on the screen at once, which would have -- unfortunately -- resulted in perceptual mush.

If I could figure out a way to cleanly overlap four cubes on screen at once (or even three for any significant duration), there's so much more I could do with this, but -- having failed to discover any solution there -- I decided to give up a bit of purity in exchange for getting to keep the most fun-feeling patterns in the game.

Don't draw them? The different speeds & sizes are confusing as is.

Having them quickly fade in when they're next might help knowing when you've cleared a gap too. I initially thought that the next box popped onto screen once you passed through the gap of the previous but I saw that this was not the case.

Is the music yours? It's good, but it doesn't fit the game's pace very well imo (the beat puts me off timing my movement) and can get a bit annoying. I gather you are jumping around in the track too when you die like Super Hexagon but the track just isn't very varied?

You've got the start of something great here though, I like it a lot, keep at it. Right now it's one of the most simultaneously frustrating but addictive games I've played! :D

[nobody]

Those are good things to think about. Thanks, Paul.

And if you still end up playing but feel like you've had enough of the audio, I'll point out that the 'm' key will mute the game. It's in the readme (though who reads those), but didn't make it into the in-game UI.

[jonbro]

I think this might do really well on kongregate... might be worth throwing up there if you can get the initial download size small enough.

[nobody]

I think this might do really well on kongregate... might be worth throwing up there if you can get the initial download size small enough.

Yeah, making a web build (and diving into the Kongregate API stuff) was always on my to-do list, but then when the time came I wasn't happy with how it felt at the lower framerate I was getting in-browser.

But running another test now has made me a little more optimistic. It's definitely a touch choppier, but maybe not so bad.

I want to give myself a bit of distance first, but if I don't hate it with a fresh set of eyes I might have a test web-build to post here later in the weekend. (~4.7MB should be fine these days, right?)

[nobody]

I keep going back and forth on whether this provisional in-browser version is playing smoothly enough, but I figured I might as well put it up here for feedback.

My inclination is to say that the downloadable version is already pushing the limits of intelligibility and that the slight drop in framerate for this in-browser version just isn't worth it, but I can't tell if I'm perhaps just being precious about the original 60fps.

[paulmcgg]

That was plenty smooth for me, didn't make an appreciable difference to playing. But then I'm not a stickler for 60fps.