2 Prototype: Zappy Orbs

Several first in one: my first major prototype made in Playmaker and my first look at Unity Particles.  The result:

Made over a weekend as a test of concept, to see if could take the then infamous Flappy Birds mechanic, a simple yet addictive physics-based challenge, and quickly redevelop it, taking advantage of Unity particles and Strumpy animated Shaders to make the game a visual treat.

I also wanted to see if I could take the core mechanics and controls of Flappy Birds and improve them, refining the physics and controls and adding behind-the-scene player assistance that would, subtly and invisibly to the player, allow the game to be pushed to entirely new heights.  This was done through the redesign of:

 

Control and Death

Unlike in the original Flappy Birds, the single-button control (mouse button or touch-pad touch) could be held down and released for constant force – a simple change, but one that produced much smoother control over the position of the orb as it moved ever onwards.

Hitting the top or bottom of the screen, or hitting any part of a shield-wall other than the darker gap, would result in death.  A nice explosive death:

BUT, unlike in the original, in here it was made possible to gain more than one life.

Passing safely through the gap in a gate would destroy the gate, causing a nice colour-explosion, changing the colour of the player to an average of their current colour and the gate’s colour, and making the player grow a little larger.

Passing five gates in a row would make the player shrink again, revealing a new, smaller orb orbiting the main one – a second life.

After this point if the player hit the top/bottom or gates, they would simply lose a life (causing a colour-explosion based on that life, and the loss of that orb), only losing the game if they lost all lives and then crashed.

This simple change gave more room for error with increased play time, and with it, more room to push the mechanics and challenge as the game progressed, especially:

 

Speed and Assistance

Every new life gained made you go faster, and faster, and faster!

But with increased speed, the player’s physics and control were subtly altered, increasing with speed so that the player always felt like they had the same amount of overall control, just less reaction time.

Additionally, though every new gate came in with its gap at a random height, the distance between the gaps of the last gate and the next gate would gradually shrink with speed.  What this meant was that, as the player got faster and faster there was less chance of being foiled by two gates impossibly close together with vastly different heights.  In fact with extreme speed the gates would even start to line up more, making the player have to shift from big movement to finer control of a speeding object, feeling ever more accomplished for successfully controlling this ever faster going orb.

In fact these behind-the-scenes tweaks soon made it possible for repeating players that had practiced the game’s controls were able to start to achieve high numbers of lives, and with it ludicrously high speed.  More challenge was needed, so a second game-stage was added.

Taking reference from sonic-boom effects, with enough speed the player would be chased by a wave of light, building up behind them, compressing, and eventually breaking in a rainbow explosion, as the player broke through the speed of light.

Here the background would change to a fast-rushing star-field, a slight colour-gradient overlay showing the path you should travel, as at this point the visuals and the gates themselves were flashing past so insanely fast as to be indistinguishable, becoming one long tunnel of rushing colour.  Following the shown path was the only way to avoid a mistake, which be explosively fatal (shown later).  But holding your course and getting faster and faster would eventually lead you to…

 

The Endgame

Where you are going so fast …

… you break through …

… space-time itself …

… winning the game.

 

Overall, a fun, simple, and above all quick prototype, testing the use both of visuals and of more refined controls and player-assisting mechanics behind the scenes to push the Flappy Birds core mechanics to ludicrous speeds.  And if, once achieving said speeds, you wanted to see how spectacular the crash would be:

As mentioned, hitting the top or bottom during the second stage was explosively fatal.

Before this stage, if the player hit the top or bottom then they would bounce, losing one life but usually being able to regain control before losing a second.

After this stage, if the player hit the top or bottom they would BOUNCE, fast and hard enough to immediately hit the other side, then the other and other again, back and forth, a coloured life exploding every time and – well you can see above, but a static image doesn’t quiet convey the sensation of coloured shockwaves exploding at every angle in a few glorious seconds of light.  Aaah, the other, just as colourful way to end the game.  Speaking of which:

 

Downloads

The game can be downloaded and played here:

Download: ZappyOrbs (32 Bit Version)

Download: ZappyOrbs (64 Bit Version)

These are zip archives – unzip to your computer, open the folder and run the exe file (setting resolution to 1920x1080).  A less than ideal way of playing it, due to:

 

Disclaimer: These are still the rapidly made versions, constructed using Playmaker as a quick test of concept only, and my first Playmaker prototypes.  As such, they are far from perfect – most notably in the final update the game began producing a moment of lag whenever a gate was passed, something that previously had not occurred.  Due to this being intended as a rapid prototype only, the source of this performance bug was not corrected.

However, I will be posting new versions of the game here asap, versions that are properly recoded in C# and take advantage of what I’ve learned since then (for example, the benefit of using trail-renderers for solid trails, rather than ultra-dense particle streams).  These new versions will also be made specifically for the Unity web-player, so that they can be played directly on this website without any downloading and configuring – just click to play.

These updated versions will be posted here soon – as soon as have finished getting up to date with posting my other prototypes, art, tools and other projects.