Mostly Tigerproof

I was all set to go off in a totally new prototyping direction, but for some reason my thoughts kept returning to the first Mostly Tigerproof prototype: Orbital Billiards. The prototype UI had a lot of really obvious problems, so perhaps I was hasty to consider the game concept a dead end.

I’ve made some improvements that should make it more of a game and less of a physics toy:

• A prediction line for the cue ball’s path.
• You can rotate the globe to view the reverse side.
• Single player score keeping.
• It’s properly turn-based this time, instead of letting you strike the ball any time.
• Twice as many pockets, twice as many balls. The pockets are now arranged around the globe in a tetrahedral formation. The starting configuration has a rack of six balls placed at the centre of each tetrahedron face. I’m hoping this gives the player far more viable shots than the old set-up with pockets at the North and South poles.

Play it on the web here.

One revision of the Glob Arena prototype had way too much recoil on the glob launcher. You could push yourself into high orbit with the thing. It was kind of fun, but it broke the game. I’ve taken that and turned it into a game in itself.

This prototype tests using these controls to navigate a 3D space. It’s an interesting set-up for me. I’ve always tended to prefer linear movement (i.e. hit left to move left) over angular steering in fast action games. These controls held the promise of using only 2 control axes to move in 3D (rather than the more traditional 4), yet still retaining the ability to sidestep projectiles.

The controls are reasonably effective, but playtesting this game is giving me a headache! Ceding control over the camera orientation to some dodgy heuristic doesn’t help with motion sickness. Particularly when the camera somersaults if you pass by a Lagrangian Point.

I think this a pretty good indication I should try something different. The Windows executable is here (5MB).
Play it on the web.

Sticky glob action returns, except this time you can rove around the globe. Globs are fired out from a player character on the surface of the sphere, and the recoil sends the player coasting in the opposite direction. This is the most conventional prototype yet, it’s recognisable as an arena shooter, even though it avoids dual-stick controls in favour of pure mouse control.

The weird physics bugs have been calmed down, so you shouldn’t be seeing any writhing compound structures. There’s still the odd force explosion of course, because my boulder spawning code isn’t very clever about where it puts things.

There’s a Windows executable here (5 MB).

This is a little experiment with pool on the surface of a sphere. You make your shots by dragging a rubber band away from the cue ball. It’s a poor man’s pool cue; you might’ve seen the same thing in minigolf video games.

It’s quite satisfying to break and send the balls flying into low orbit, although judging cut angles is distinctly tougher than in normal pool because of the oddities of spherical geometry. I had some difficulties getting Ageia to do gravitation toward a point without screwing up static friction. As a result the balls coast to a stop much too gradually. I haven’t pursued this concept far enough to give it AI for single player.

There’s a windows executable here (5 MB).
Play it on the web.