UNIVERSE: Flare [DONE]

[mildmojo]

PLAY NOW (Unity3D plugin required) or Download for Win/Mac

(Controls: arrows for movement, space to jump, M to toggle music)

This is Flare, a game that six of us put together in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam in January. This pageant version has been improved a bit; I was able to squash a few bugs and give it better gameplay and a better ending.

In a nutshell, your corner of the universe just got a little unstable. A black hole has appeared, and your solar system is circling the drain. Time to leave home and stay one leap ahead of the all-consuming gravity well.

Gameplay is gravity-influenced platforming. You have to avoid getting sucked into the black hole by jumping between planets. If you get careless, you may end up catapulting yourself out into the void of space.

Thanks to Unity3D for giving GGJ participants a free Pro licenses for a few days. Apologies to Linux users, as there's currently no way to build a Linux version of the game in Unity. Linux is my primary OS, too, so I understand the frustration. I haven't tried the Windows version in WINE--do let me know if that works.

CREDITS:
Code/art/fx: pjchardt
Art/animation/asset mgmt: Shylo
Code: @mildmojo
Code/guidance: John Meister
Music: Mathieu
Mystical Powers: @nickwarner

[Stephen L (inactive)]

Like the realization of what was going on
Default width of embedded player was WAAAY too wide (no more than 800px, people), thank heavens for a fullscreen mode
Several times I jumped but in spite of getting quite close to other planets, didn't enter their gravitational field. Made things frustrating.

[mildmojo]

Like the realization of what was going on
Default width of embedded player was WAAAY too wide (no more than 800px, people), thank heavens for a fullscreen mode
Several times I jumped but in spite of getting quite close to other planets, didn't enter their gravitational field. Made things frustrating.

Huh. What browser/platform? The web player's actually set to render at 800x600. My netbook is only 1024x600, so I do try to target smaller screens.

I think you probably hit a bug relating to the gravity debounce. It's supposed to prevent the character from stuttering between planets, but it can also prevent you from latching on if you're too close when you make the jump.

[Stephen L (inactive)]

firefox 10.0.1 on latest osx

[mcc]

This was soooo coooool

I liked just about everything about this. I like how it worked as a high score game, and how when you fail your penalty is just you regress to a lower level. I loved the surprise ending if you go "too far". I loved the atmosphere and the visuals and the interesting emergent platforming situations that the orbiting planets created and...

The only problem I had was it was tricky to figure out which "planet" you are currently attached to, and sometimes it seemed capricious which planet I was going to be attracted to, like sometimes I'd literally bump my head on another planet without reparenting to it. This kind of felt like a big discouragement from trying again and going for higher scores, because once I got out very far it felt like on any one jump I was going to either succeed or fail based on whether the gravity picker decided to work or not and not based on something about my technique. (It also got very hard in the late game if I wound up near the center, because there would be a lot of spheres in one place and I'd keep switching between them crazily while in midair).

I would highly urge you to try to clean up the mechanics and maybe get some slightly less repetitive music and try to release a post-compos version through more formal channels, because this could be very addictive if the gravity picker were a bit smarter. I could even imagine this working as a tablet game (if there were leaderboards or something maybe?!).

Note: I played only the downloadable version.

[mildmojo]

@Stephen: That's strange, I used FF 10.1/OSX when I was proofing that page. It seems to be working for me. You're talking about the plugin game window itself being far too wide, right? I put it through browsershots.org and I didn't see any strangeness across a few different browsers. If you have a chance, can you try visiting this page to see if it's any different? That's the page emitted by Unity3D itself which I used as a template.

@mcc: Thanks so much! (On behalf of the group.) I agree with you and Stephen about the gravity picker. Early on, we decided to use Unity's gravity instead of rolling our own, but it assumes a single source. So the game is re-parenting that gravity vector when you get inside a buffer distance from a planet's surface, unless you started your jump within that distance. A better way to handle it would be to do real-time distance calculations and maybe allow more than one planet to influence the gravitational field.

I've got an Android build that plays reasonably well on my phone and tablet (tilt to move, touch to jump) but it needs actual touch controls and GUI for settings and instructions.

Thanks for the encouragement. I think pjchardt's getting an actual Unity Pro license. We've talked a bit about picking back up on it after he gets an XBLIG game out the door (360 shooter Compromised).