Description
Guide a ball by tilting the levels. Go through portals, use jump pads, watch out for obstacles, and try not to fall off the map.
Program: Unity
Language: C#
Team Project: 4 Members
My Role: Programmer
Why Was This Created?
Super Blue Ball is a game created for a York University course: Game Development II.
The goal was to create something in Unity within 2 weeks that demonstrated scripting, prototyping, level design and other techniques which were learned in previous game design courses.
Roles & Responsibilities
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Since they both change the player's location in the world, teleportation (the method to navigate level-to-level) and the checkpoint system were both created by me.
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Many bugs were found during the small window of development which ranged from the levels glitching and stuttering during their rotations, to the ball not rolling on the floor as intended. I was the main bug-fixer so most bugs were fixed by me.
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The third and last level was entirely constructed by me. It is the most complex and offers a difficult challenge before the ending of the game. It also ended up leading to a whole new programming challenge.
Biggest Challenge
Most of the mechanics were tested in this little scene and many didn't make it into the main game. Initially, the levels were mazes and the player had to roll away from a pursuing red ball.
The biggest challenge was level 3, the largest level. Pivoting a large level from a pivot far from the ball would cause a substantially larger rotation compared to a pivot that was much closer. The large rotations would simply be uncontrollable. So, I created a pivot off-set system in order to dynamically offset the levels pivot to the ball. Adding such a system so close to the due date was a mistake, and caused more stress than was necessary.
Later, it was suggested that the level could have simply been broken down into multiple levels, each of which would need only a single pivot. This would have been a much better alternative. I learned not to add too many things so close to the due date, and to think of more clever solutions to challenges which may not require creating entirely new systems at all. Regardless, I did manage to successfully fix the problem in time.
Download
Download here or on Itch.io.