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GravPool



A 3D game of pool set in outer space. Hit the colored billiard balls out into the vacuum. If you hit a bomb, hit it out in one go or it will destroy the other balls - and you with them.

It's now available.

http://store.steampowered.com//app/497480

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Starting this devlog a bit late. I got a Vive in April and messed around with a few different things before settling on an outer space pool game the first game I developed in VR. I use unity, because that's what you use in VR. Unless you want to use Unreal. There are a few of those. While there are a lot of little things that irritate me about unity, it feels like a cohesive package, which I appreciate much more than the haphazard collection of (perhaps high quality) tools that is Unreal to me.

I had an idea in my head, but experimenting with it definitely posed some challenges. The first version was a very direct extrapolation of pool, but in 3-dimensions. You play not on a flat plane, but with height as well. The balls are suspended in space, but physically still behave similarly to flat billiards, with an appropriate amount of drag. You are in a room, and the pockets are on each of the four walls as well as the ceiling and the floor.

Using the Vive, you can walk around the cue ball to get a good shot, and you use the controllers to mimick a cue stick to take a shot. It felt pretty good, but was abysmally boring to play. Here's a screenshot from the first version:

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Why was it so boring? Well firstly, I am REALLY BAD at pool in real life. So for a long time I thought I was just bad, and there wasn't anything wrong with the game. After thinking about the problem more though...

Where is the challenge in pool? Hitting the colored balls into the pockets. Sure, occasionally, you will miss hitting any balls at all. But it doesn't take long to get good enough at strokes to at least hit a colored ball every once in a while.

In my early version, I was spending most of my time trying to hit ANYTHING. If I did hit something, getting it into the tiny holes in the walls was an effort in futility.

After noodling around with the physics and such for a while, I ended up going in a slightly different direction. Why is it so easy to hit things in pool (even for me!) and so hard here? Well, considering the third dimension, I had just increased the challenge by about 360 degrees.

Not wanting to give up on the idea of 3d, I decided the best way to limit that challenge space (that of having 360*360 directions in which the white ball can go in a shot) by shrinking the arena size, and increasing the ball size.

They are now about the size of beach balls. You can't tell on the flat screen, but you can bet it's noticeable while wearing the headset!

Yes.

I made the game better by... having bigger balls.



I also made the "pockets" much bigger.

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Currently the core physics work pretty good, and I've set a very ambitious deadline for myself, so the focus is on gameplay and adding modes and features. Current plans are to have a 1-player score attack mode, and a 2-player hotseat mode. Hotseat in VR is a little bit annoying due to taking the headset off and on, but I don't have the energy to do networking at the moment. Hopefully that's something I can add at some point? Same with an AI. A good AI for 2d pool would be difficult enough! But I also would love to add that at some point.

For now, the focus is on making a good score attack mode. It's a common mode for Vive games - some people don't like the reliance on arcade-style gameplay, but at my day job we love to compete with each other during breaks on our in-house Vive. We used to do similar on an arcade emulator - the Vive is much more fun.

I'm thinking of scoring 1 point for each ball you hit out, with a combo multiplier (number of balls in combo^2), a streak multiplier (+1 bonus for each hit that successfully sinks something) and negative points for hitting the white ball out of bounds or a bomb. There will also be a few levels, as a single round goes pretty quickly right now. (I may have unbalanced things and made it too easy with my big balls edition!)

Today I added a level notification so the player is aware of when they have passed to a new stage. Considering where to put these kinds of notifications in VR always raises so many questions. You just don't know where the player is going to be looking at any given time. You can fix the message in the center of the screen as traditional games do, but it can feel odd to have a big pop-up message attached to your face. You CAN'T put it in the corners very well, as the edges of the screen can be blurry, especially if you ask the player to rotate their eyeball to look at that corner directly.

The best option I think is to put your messaging in the world, an object you can reach out and touch like any other. But that still raises the question of making sure the player notices that the message is even there. I really want to bring the passage of one stage to the next to the players attention! I devised a rotating sign, so no matter where they are looking, it's hard to miss:



It feels really well in game actually, and I want to cheer when it appears and I know I made it to the next stage!

It's kind of a placeholder right now of course, I do intend to change the model for something more interesting. Maybe make it look like some flying robot thing projecting a hologram.

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Earlier this week I built the first version that I really felt worked as a game. It is a simple score attack mode where you play through a few levels and try to get a good score at the end. You get more points for combos (multiple balls sunk on a hit), and lose points for misses or triggering a bomb. Bombs are especially bad because any ball they knock out of bounds can't be scored.

I put a demo up and have gotten feedback from one user. We had a nice discussion about it, and I learned a lot. My favorite thing that I learned, was my crazy idea translated to another person and they found it enjoyable. I was really unsure about that. I do have a hard time in taking my unique ideas and making them translate to another person, so I'm glad in this case that seemed to happen.

Of course, there were a lot of things that didn't work. The whole scoring system and the bombs turns out to be very confusing, and is not surfaced in a clear enough way to the user. I guess just having a screen on your hand that displays a single score value that keeps going up and down apparently randomly isn't good enough.

I'll be spending the weekend focusing on implementing a local multiplayer mode and may tackle some of the issues that came up in the test as well.

The design challenge with multiplayer is to make each players "turn" long enough to offset the annoyance of taking off the headset and putting it on the next player between turns. Current working plan is to give all players 3 shot attempts. That would be way too easy on the current arena but may work on a more challenging one. And then you get extra attempts if you earn points.

I would put the project as going well, but timeline is still really ambitious and I know I won't be able to get to everything on the roadmap.

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Oh and I'm looking for more testers if anyone is interested. Unfortunately you have to have a vive so I don't expect to find many takers!

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Game Development is Blood, sweat, and liquid crystals

I am getting close to the end of GravPool development, which is exciting, but I definitely enjoy the start of a project more than the end. All of the possibilities stretch out before you, and anything can happen. I participated in a 2-week game jam with the intent to prototype the vr game I will work on after I finish GravPool.

It turns out, trying to make 2 games at once isn't the best idea. I ended up putting very little energy into the new game, and continued to focus on GravPool. Probably the better choice, but I did hope to at least finish a submission for the jam.

While testing my game, "Puncher VR" a few minutes before the deadline, my stress led me to panic and this is the result:



Yep. I not only punched those virtual kangaroos, but my TV as well. I loved that TV too. I'm going to see if I can get a replacement through Best Buy, I think for once I actually bought the protection plan. So we'll see. But I definitely learned a lesson. And I might work on a different "game 2" when I get to that point lol.

GravPool Milestones

Since I last posted here, I've done a lot. The finish-line looms but I am more excited than pressured by it. I did in fact manage to hack a turn-based multiplayer in, and it works pretty well. Much of the in-game bookeeping needed to be refactored, but the code is a little clearer and more isolated now, which will help when I add more modes. I went with the three turns model, but haven't tested extensively to see if that works well enough. Each player gets three shots, no more and no less. Bombs still play a pretty substantial role - they can be used to eliminate the other players balls from the scene, but you also lose a lot of points for setting them off. And knocking your opponents balls out scores for them.

I set the multiplayer game in a larger arena, big enough to better support all 16 balls. I had forgotten how challenging 3d pool is in the bigger arena, but it feels about right to me.

Other than multiplayer, I've been iterating on getting that physics to work right. It's close, but there are still some bad situations you can get into. If you happen to have the stick right next to the ball when you press the trigger, it will act as if you did a light tap. I want to refine that so that it wont let you activate physics at all while the stick is touching anything. This is also a problem in that you can take your shot through the wall if the ball is in a corner, which removes some of the fun I think of trying to line up those awkward shots.

Finally, I added steam leaderboards! I am even more convinced that the base gameplay is fun, as I have been playing with the other testers and fighting for scores. So far, I had one incredibly lucky run that's twice the score of the next best player. I didn't set off any bombs, and got a combo on almost every shot.

In the middle of my score session American Pie came on the radio and I took a break to dance in space with billiard balls floating around my head. VR may be deadly for tvs but it has some great surreal moments

Testing

I'm cramming this weekend to finish some items related to polish and clean up the remaining bugs, and then going to bring a near-final build of the game to the local monthly VR meetup. There are usually 100 people there, so depending on interest and time I hope to get a lot of good feedback there. It will be great if I can get some folks to play a multiplayer session and see how that goes! If everything goes well, I can implement the final tweaks that weekend and be ready for a smooth launch the week after.

There are 2 other gameplay modes that I will have to add post launch. I'm still deciding between launching in early access, or just having one of those fun post-launch patches that adds a lot. I want a survival mode where you go through a large number of procedural levels and if you miss a shot or set off a bomb you lose; and then I want to make a puzzle mode where you have a limited number of shots to beat each level and have to hit the balls in a certain order, or hit the certain colors to a certain side of the arena etc. I would want a level editor for that as well.

I've never put this much effort into a project for this long (it's been about 3 or 4 months), so having a deadline has helped me immeasurably. I really recommend giving yourself a strict deadline for your projects if you can.

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Latest gif:


The cram session is in full blast!

Over the weekend, I worked on fixing bugs, adding random polish, and taking most of the feedback I had gotten that I agreed with and trying to determine which things would be worth looking into. Oh, and rescoping and rescoping the game so that I have a chance of finishing!

There are repeated comments on the somewhat drab looking game world, but I kind of don't know what to do with that one. The game is generated by an algorithm, putting together a couple pre-made pieces for the walls. The focus is on arenas that make bouncing balls work well with each other. Deceptive areas where they almost score but then bounce back in, holes that are hard to reach, or a lot of room for the balls and bombs to cause chaos together. I'm not really using the generation that well, as there are only a handful of environments. But it feels like a lot of work to change the art, and I'm not sure what I would change it to. So I have contented myself to add enough other things going on in the world and the scene to hopefully distract from that.

I've been working around 4-8 hours a day on this in addition to the 8 hours of work at my day job. It's kind of killing me right now, but only a week to go, and then I can take a breather.

I submitted a final-ish build to valve on monday and by tuesday it was accepted, so I can hit the button whenever I like. Overall, I've been pretty impressed with the steam process, even if some things seem more complex and unintuitive than they should be. Having a build be reviewed in 1 day? For a VR game? And I know they actually loaded it up and tested it, because they found some issues which I had to correct.

Tomorrow I take the game to the local vr meetup of ~100 people. I'm hoping since there is a 1v1 mode in GravPool, that I can get people to sign up for a tournament of sorts. Maybe I could give something away? I have a gearvr I don't use much... I also have a lot of pax badges, I might be willing to part with one of them.

After that, I have a final weekend to try and do better at promotion and finish final polish. There is one more game mode I was thinking of adding, an endless survival mode where missing a shot ends the game, which shouldn't be too hard that I may be able to sneak in. As fun as the game already is, I know it's pretty light on content, and I suspect the audience (if anyone shows up - see doing better at promotion) may ding me for that.

I've still made a game I'm pretty proud of at this point. Definitely a milestone in the gamedev life.

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I've added... a lot in the past few days. I didn't end up making it to that meetup where I was going to do some more user testing. It may be a real missed opportunity, after all that I have done, I finally got a chance to play with my sister, and she had trouble figuring out how to do anything in the game. Absolutely nothing is clear, and with hours to go, I don't know how much I will be able to do to steer things back in the right direction.

It's what always happens with game design for me, and I'm not sure how to fix this problem, besides more user testing at more points during development. As you develop, you end up testing your game a lot. The more you play it, the better you get at your own game. Eventually, it feels far too easy, and the worry about the game seeming too easy - even knowing that this can happen - means tweaks to challenge tend to enter in. This cycle repeats many many times, until you end up with something like "I wanna be the guy" when you were intending something more like "Super Mario Bros".

There are a few things I can do to adjust balance in the other direction. All that I know, is it is either going to be too much or too little

Additions in the last week:

The space scenery was alright and everything, but was a bit too static. Solution: asteroids!


It would be nice to know where you actually hit the ball to have more feedback. You can never have too much feedback in the chaotic and busy world of VR. It's surprisingly hard to keep players focused on what is important! I attempted to make some cool sparks that bounce off, but wrangling unity's physics was surprisingly difficult. There are more important things to work on so I shelved this for now.

Survival mode! With some thought, I came up with a framework for the endless survival mode. Some of the most important parts of game design happen when away from keyboard - I thought of it while lying awake in bed (I'm not getting a lot of sleep) Essentially, it just keeps giving you new arenas with more balls and bombs in them, and less holes in the arena, and a shot clock ticks down. If you run out of time, you lose. When you complete a level, you get some time back. I'm not sure that it is "fun" yet, but it was surprisingly easy to implement, especially after having that afk time of thinking through all of the possibilities.

The challenge was in digging back into my woeful *math* skills and remember how logarithms work. (The amount of seconds you get back at each level is a logarithmic function). Here's a shot of the kind of levels that are generated. Yeah. They are pretty random.

Finally, I've worked on bugs. Lot's of bugs. Even though most of my testers have commented on the lack of bugs, they are still in there. Fortunately, even though I took a HUGE risk adding a third game mode, I managed to not introduce any new ones. And in the end, I feel a lot better about this game with 3 modes rather than 2. It feels a little more complete.

And with that, I will open things up to the public tomorrow and see what happens! I don't expect to sell very many copies. It's a bit of a unique game, even for vr, and the age of the small, casual, but unique vr game may have passed. (I had started development really at the height of that phase). But it will be interesting to see how people respond. I've worked probably harder on this project than any other. But as we all know, how hard you work generally doesn't indicate one way or another how the audience will feel about a work. The product, and the user's expectations, will make their ultimate determination.

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I finished the game last weekend and released on time. I will do more of a post-mortem in due time, I am quite wiped from crunching one weekend and then paxing the next. I'm spending the next few weeks engrossed in some comfort gaming (adventure games happen to be my jam there) and not working on anything too intensely.

The game hasn't sold well, but it has sold a bit. It's my first game, so I may have had too high expectations for the first week. I think it's too early to know why it's been slow to excite people, but I have many theories of what hasn't helped me. So many theories There is some hope on the horizon, as wishlist numbers are pretty good - if all of my wishlist numbers were sales then I would have come close to matching my predicted numbers. I believe they are waiting for either an update or a price drop/sale.

All in all, I'm pretty proud of myself. Somewhere around June, I decided I wanted to actually finish a game and release it on steam rather than developing a project for 4 years and then burning out. I did just that, without a slip in the release date either. I stuck to my plan and shipped, and I think the game is pretty good as well.

I think with a few more updates I can turn it from pretty good to good or even great. But I have to decide how much more I want to invest here vs starting a new project. And when I do start a new project, it's going to be hard to find one that is the next step up from GravPool, rather than going off and trying to work on a pie in the sky dream game that I burn out on again.

I'm such a dreamer that it can be hard to force myself to at least keep one limb on earth. I think having my first game on the market will help do so. Is it a leg or an arm? Maybe just a finger.