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[The_A_Drain]

Couple weeks ago I finally found some spare time to devote to gamedev again, and found myself drawn to a Super Monkey Ball/Switchball/Marble Madness/Marble Blast inspired prototype with simple retro-future VR inspired visuals (think Tron, Lawnmower Man, and this video:

)



Originally the plan was a bit more expansive, and featured large, multi-goal levels in which you collect memory fragments to progress and unlock other areas (like Mario 64 with stars/paintings) and could unlock some extra abilities for the sphere, but I wanted to scale right back in order to have a more realistic scope. The game has a very simple backstory (about a scientist who goes mad in the process of digitizing his consciousness which destabilizes an otherwise peaceful virtual world) and I'm shooting for between 30 and 50 stages total with some collectibles and secret stages.

My goal is to keep this updated at a minimum of once every two weeks, I've got a timeframe planned out for development with a target release of around September/October for PC/Mac/Linux.

There's no playable build at the moment because I wasn't 100% happy with how the physics felt in the prototype (they felt great moving about but gravity wasn't quite right) so I'm re-working it to get the core movement mechanic feeling nice and smooth.

I'll come along and add more over the next couple days

edit: sorry if the images are a bit huge, might replace them with smaller ones when I get back to my computer

Bonus gif:
http://i.imgur.com/wOl7cUr.gifv

[The_A_Drain]

Just flying by with a quick update.

I tore out my initial prototype code for the ball which had some issues I wasn't happy with, I wanted more separation between how the ball behaves in the XZ plane versus the Y axis, so I stopped using Unity's drag and calculated my own instead, it needs some tweaking in regards to acceleration I think but otherwise it's very close to how I'd like it, so I can start implementing stages/obstacles this week.

[Zorg]

I like the artstyle and the impression of tilting the world. Looks good. But you should not push the tilt angle too hard and zoom out. imho.

Which are the controls you have in mind? Mouse + WASD? Will gamepad be possible?

[The_A_Drain]

I'm still playing with the camera distance and world tilt angle, I actually increased the tilt angle yesterday and was thinking it felt a bit too much, so I'll probably decrease it again.

The camera I'll probably give people the option of a couple different zoom levels.

Controls at the moment are WASD + Mouse look or controller (atm only tested with xbox 360 controller) left stick to move right stick to rotate the camera.

I've designed a bunch of early levels that I hope to start implementing very soon

[Zorg]

I'm looking forward to a prototype/demo.

[The_A_Drain]

Cool, yeah hopefully should post something playable this weekend, hopefully in time for r/gamedev feedback friday, but that depends if I can get as much time to myself this week as I would like, I also need to figure out how to build to WebGL and how to host WebGL projects because of the whole Chrome/NPAPI thing meaning Chrome now hates Webplayer.