Wobbly Dot

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Arcade Karg 18 May , 2020 0

Info

Wobbly Dot is a free browser game that combines hyper-casual control mechanics with level based puzzles. The goal is very simple: get to the target, but...there is a catch. You're not moving in a straight line...

Try to complete the levels in less time to get the star for each level.

A shop is available to spend your stars and change the look of your avatar. At the moment, you can't get enough stars to buy all the avatars, but as new levels will be added in, you could.

If you've enjoyed this game, I would appreciate your support! Please subscribe and follow me on Coil, as it will help keep my site alive, ad free and keep me making free browser games. But if this is not your thing, please consider giving a like/follow on Facebook, Twitter or Youtube or maybe sharing this game on your favorite social network!

Tech

The game was developed in Typescript and Cocos Creator, with HTML5 as export target.

Development

Wobbly Dot is part of a batch of 12 games that I plan to develop and release in 2020. The process started at the end of 2019 with a broad selection of game-play ideas, which was followed by fleshing them out with graphics and prototypes. You can read more about the trials and tribulations in my Game Dev Roadmap for 2020 article.

I don't usually do prototypes for games. In fact, in the previous 20 games released as indie, I've never done one. However, I've decided to make a prototype for this just to test if orbit and spin changing mechanics could be fun. It took less than 20 minutes to do so, and, yeah, it looked like it could be fun.

I've already had some concepts for the art that I've tried for Art Of Balance. This part, establishing a style for the game, is very consuming for me, but for this one it was really stright-forward. It took around 10 hours to make the initial art, then a couple of more hours for additional art required during the level design phase.

Code-wise, I've used much of the architecture and code from my previous Cocos Creator games, following my incremental game developing process. In short, I've copied the code from Dog And Ball Forever and adjusted it accordingly to the new requirements :)

It uses the integrated physics engine for collision. Since the shader pipeline was simplified in Cocos Creator 2.3.x, I've decided to give it a go, so the locked target that ondulates uses a custom shader. Pretty happy with my first dip into shader programming!

Level design proved a bit of a challenge, as I've tried to make the game quite diverse and introduce many different mechanics and "enemies". Because of this, I had to make additional art during this phase, but, in the end, I think it's worth it. I'm quite happy with the levels inspired by bullet-hell shooters, merging together with a hyper-casual mechanics resulted in something...interesting.

The background music is called Superconnected Sleep and was composed by Soft And Furious, one of the aliases of the French music composer Monplaisir.