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Gravity Cube
Fast-Paced 2D Platformer
Role:
Design & Programming (Team of 3)
Assignment:
Ravel's Physics Game Jam & Africa Games Week
Programs:
Unity 5 & C# in Visual Studio
Physics Game Jam Project
The first iteration of the game was created in the space of 36 hours. The vision was to make a game that was challenging yet still fun for players to get through in a 2D platformer format.
Using cubes, the player (also a cube) can shoot themselves around the map while trying to avoid obstacles and traps (Fun, right?) while the map rotates (not as fun anymore)
The limited time we had meant that there were many issues early on but the purpose of keeping the design simple meant that we could develop a playable, entertaining game and expand on it later. Eventually, it was presented at Africa Games Week 2022.
We took feedback into consideration and ended up getting as far as we felt was possible until moving on from Gravity Cube
Gravity Cube Demo
Take a look at the gameplay trailer below! And then walk through the process from the first 36 hours all the way into further production
The First 36 Hours
We had our vision, our goal, and our design! All within an hour might I add, but all that looked good on paper, however, how would we fair in beating the clock for submission on our new endeavour:
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We were committed to making a game that would be 2D, physics-based, and present a challenge to the player.
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Luckily I had two other versatile designers with me to focus on multiple facets of creating our new idea starting with the three Cs
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The character: a basic cube, the control: the ability to move around the world using cubes to place between collisions to fire them into the air and have a short jump for the less aggregious gaps, and then the camera: would centre in on the player at all times.
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Now all we had to do was lay out the obstacles. What would stop the player from getting from point A to point B in our 2D box?
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Some AI enemies? Too costly. An evil boss pointing us in the wrong direction? Wouldn't make sense in context.
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What about some good old-fashioned traps? That was it!
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Some lasers on a timer, a few saws, projectiles from turrets and we were good to go
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I've added our 1 hour GDD below with links to all to support images and the one page pitch
Gravity Cube 1 Hour GDD
Game Concept Pitch
Supporting Images
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But it was still...kind of easy...and not very enticing or new. Just another platformer.
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We thought about some sort of design that would really throw a spanner into the works. Something that would make the player think hard about when to use their movement.
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Wait a second... Map Rotation!
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This proved difficult though. It affected player movement, smoothness, and mechanics, such as the bullet firing from the turret.
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The bullet would often lose velocity, and so we set out by giving the bullet a script that would ignore the gravity physics of the map.
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The player still jitters around as we never found a fix for that however the movement felt a lot better and was heavily affected by gravitational pull.
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This gives the player agency on when to move and use that extra force to make it through certain areas of the levels which is exactly what we were aiming for in the design.
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The game is also built in 3D helping with the physics which also gives room for aesthetics as we are able model many assets in Blender, instead of using a 2D software.
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Level design was also easier to adjust which became a vitally important portion of the game to make the player feel like there was a fair shot of getting through each section.
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Essentially, the more the player memorised, the better chances they have.
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We also struggled to add in any UI design due to the time constraints, but we’ve since developed the graphics and design portion of the game compared to the first iteration.
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Other systems that didn't quite work were the lasers turning on and off.
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This was because of a scripting error in putting the timer reset in the wrong function.
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The biggest issue regarding feedback from the first iteration was the game mechanic, although entertaining, it was frustrating and probably made the game too difficult.
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After reviewing notes, we set out to start adding features that would make the game more balanced yet with the same feeling of difficulty.
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Players seemed to really enjoy the challenge and we didn't want to remove that element entirely!
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A Playthrough of The Earliest Gravity Cube Build
This is a laid back and fun playthrough video I had taken for YouTube when we had submitted the first iteration of Gravity Cube for the game jam.
Please enjoy!
Development into Africa Games Week 2022
The thing I absolutely love about Gravity Cube is that it feels new, fresh, and like a real challenge! The vision we stuck to was all we needed to make sure we never lost that feel for the game. The only issue was that we had played it so much that we were good at it where as other players just found it heavily frustrating to begin with. The learning curve was very steep. So how did we address this?
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It's no secret that Gravity Cube was designed in a hurry, so we needed to go look at what systems we had implemented and work around that core loop to add features to help the player feel it was a bit fairer.
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In order to not destroy the core idea, we only wanted to add mechanics that would help the player with some frustrating areas for different levels. We addressed this with a few new additions seen below.
Mechanics
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So using some fairly simple solutions, we helped players feel a bit more in control as well as allowed them to control the tempo of the game to get into more optimal situations for success through a section of a level
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We still wanted to provide a great tone and feel to the game as well: One of anxiety, danger, and the need to escape.
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Using a neon retro theme allowed us to really hone in on the signage as well as being able to highlight the correct areas for the player.
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Warning signs allowed us to indicate dangerous areas for the players, while falling debris allowed us to indicate the gravitational pull for the player.
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Finally using audio inspired by Star Wars and Bladerunner was a great way for us to give that feel of a futuristic world despite the symmetry and object shapes being fairly basic.
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Game Feel
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Players now had an easier time of working through the levels using the added features, visual aids and mechanics. After a few more weeks of design and development, we were ready to showcase Gravity Cube at Africa Games Week 2022.
Development Since
We received some great feedback from Africa Games Week, as well as getting any thoughts on some features we wanted to add into the title which was received with some praise and feedback negative and positive alike
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For future development, we would like to add a multiplayer feature focusing on Player vs Element where players will be able to help each other through complicated maps.
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A Player vs Player mode focusing on getting the players to battle each other to see who can reach the end of maps quickest. (Inspired by Fall Guys and Mario Kart)
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We'd have to restructure certain design features as well as lay out a format into a system map in terms of what could and could not be affected
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It's difficult to know what sort of problem we're trying to solve with this addition as well but we know we'd want to keep it within the vision: Fun, simple AND challenging to play (perhaps with some friends this time)
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Also, we want to restructure the entire tutorial to add more world-building and a better onboarding experience for players where they will learn the mechanics a lot more easily.
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Finally, the addition of power-ups to give players an advantage in both single-player and multi-player to help the player through the map faster and to help create unpredictability within the game where anybody might be able to catch a player leading the pack, similar to that of Mario Kart.
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Doing this would build a much higher tension than our single-player mode would provide but we can already foresee issues into the future with this which is not just limited to client vs peer based servers.
Post-Mortem
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Creating a definitive system map would be helpful compared to the very rough draft seen in the first section especially because it was done in a rush and more thought and time should be spent on this area.
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Something to consider is that the code base at this stage is old and inefficient, because once again, it was created in a rush, so it would be best if it was scrapped and restarted from scratch.
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Unity is a difficult engine to keep using these days due to the way the market has changed and presenting a project like this for funding would eliminate that prospect unless we went for the indie route.
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A potential of looking into this being fully ported into a 2D format could be a discussion however it would destroy a lot of the world-building elements available in a 3D work-space. The Pedestrian was a great source of inspiration for doing this, and I would hope to replicate that mesh of 2D to 3D elements
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Better and more intricate systems would need to be designed beforehand. The flow of choosing levels is a shoe-horn experience and could better be implemented in a diegetic way considering we tried to implement everything into one level space instead of multiple levels to create a better user flow.
End
And that's it for the making of Gravity Cube! I hope to one day revisit the concept and potentially add all the new knowledge I've gained through my journey in the industry to it. Who knows, this page might end up being larger at some stage ;p
Thank you for going through it and if you'd like to try out the build, consider getting it from the button link at the top of the page.