New Release: Art Of Balance!

Hey, hey, hey! It’s a Friday, new-game-release time!

Design

Art Of Balance is inspired by classic Flash games like Super Stacker and Perfect Balance series and it brings an unique gameplay gimmick, inspired by the art of rock balancing: in some levels, stones take a delay to activate. This creates the possibility to create more complex puzzles.

Art

For this one, I’ve chosen an abstract art style, inspired by 20th century abstract painter masters like Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay and many others. Because each level is crafted in slightly different visual style, it took quite a while to create them, from research of paintings to actual vector draws in Inkscape, balancing for the sake of gameplay and adding the finishing touches like animated bits. These 20 levels took almost 3 weeks to create and several passes were made to adjust the gameplay for both desktop and touch-screen devices.

The game base resolution is 960×640, which should be enough for anything except going full-screen 😉

Implementation

Cocos Creator was used as the middle-ware and all the coding was done in Typescript. Building on Dodge This level-based framework, an inventory system was developed (and will be further used for a couple of more games in the future).

Level design was done entirely in the Cocos Creator editor, and each level is a prefab. Using the powerful time-line animation tool, I could add details…and as of such, everything is in motion, water waves wave, blades of grass swing, abstract insects fly around. This was awesome, because it add an interesting layer on top of the usual abstract art.

Game should work on most browser and devices, the least powerful I’ve tested on was a 6-years old IPad Mini. However, gameplay is much more suitable to desktop and tablets than to mobile, because of screen size.

Audio

I’ve used Loyalty Freak Music‘s “Once More With You” track, licensed under CC0. Check out more of this artist music!

Final Words

I might add more levels, if the game proves interesting for players. Please leave your comments here or on Facebook, if you’d like this to happen.

Another game is currently finished and 6(!) more are currently in development. Check out soon for new content!