The changes are:

• The prediction line now shows the extent of the cue ball, rather than just its centreline. Now it’s much easier to judge the angle of a shot that isn’t straight.
• The globe surface is now marked with lines that indicate the direction of the nearest hole.
• Scoring has been revamped to reward runs where several balls of the same colour are sunk. Each colour has a score multiplier which is raised by sinking balls of that colour.
• The shot power meter has markings that indicate how many degrees around the globe the cue ball will travel before coasting to a stop.
• The camera FOV is much narrower. This should make it easier to judge angles on the reverse side of the globe.
• I’ve capped the fullscreen frame rate to 60FPS. This should prevent laptop owners scorching their laps!
• When you sink a ball, you’ll see it fall to the centre of the globe. It’s cosmetic, but satisfying.
• I’ve modelled the pockets instead of using a plain sphere with pitch black triggers attached. I’ve violated my design constraint of only using perfect spheres!

Play it on the web here.

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.

Glob Arena was the prototype I enjoyed the most. I’ve gone back to it and filled it out with 5 more enemy types. While none of them has changed the game as much as I’d hoped, the extra variety has given it more longevity.

I’m starting to explore the idea of an ecology of creatures inhabiting the arena, interacting with one another. The first revision of the game just fills and fills with obstacles. I’ve given this one some monsters that consume others and it’s helped to maintain a reasonable enemy density in the endgame.

The windows executable is here (5MB).
Play it on the web.

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.

How many satellites can you keep in orbit? Click to place satellites in orbit and set them on paths that won’t collide.

This prototype is a bit of a dead-end; it’s too shallow. I’ve put it up here as a headstone to the last few days of effort trying to turn it into something more. I experimented with flinging the satellites with mouse motion, but it was inferior to what you see here. It made it really hard to set a consistent orbital velocity. I also thought about adding an opposing team of bad satellites, but it’s pretty clear that there would be epic collateral damage every time you try to deorbit one.

Still, the randomised news-flash messages are fun. Get the Windows version here (5 MB).
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).

• The aim is to prevent balls from falling into the hole.
• You do this by shooting sticky spheres at them.

Now you’re probably thinking there’s some kind of h-game subtext to shooting sticky globs, but I’ve got a different theme in mind.

It’s very chaotic and not calmed down by the charming bug where clusters of spheres start spinning for no apparent reason. Still haven’t tracked down the source of all this mysterious torque. In any case, it keeps it unpredictable.

Get the windows executable here (5 MB).
Play it on the web.

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.