Kickoff

There are some projects that are just ideas in the head for years. On the other hand there are projects that just build themselves when you start with them. Unstable is definitely one of the second category.

I’ve started initially for the Ludum Dare 49 Compo, but my goal was to finish everything in just one day. However, things took a bit longer to set up and after the first prototype the new Unity Hub decided to just recreate the whole project folder out of the 2D template again. I don’t know how and it’s the first time that this happened (even the newly added files where removed). However, I decided that I skip the contest.

Two days later the idea was still in my head - mostly because this was the first “small” project for quite a while. Normally games just escalated in their scope, if you can’t manage to restrict the scope in the first hand.

The Progress

I’ve used Unity and the new Input Manager (which is quite mighty, but also needed some time to get into) for this project. Basically, I just wanted to create a touch and click interface for adding stuff, moving it and finally placing it. So I’ve watched some tutorials, integrated the touch controls and added a dummy prototype.

After that I needed some UI to show the current stats as well as displaying a simple menu and goal screen. I’ve integrated them in a simple manner and only one scene.

There was a lot of iterative and agile development in this project since I did some play-testing and then developed the next feature or fix another bug. I’ve cleaned up the colliders and improved the “height calculation” (at the beginning I used the current click position for the dummy -> yeah, fast development) by using the highest collision of the boxes. I noticed that it was a bit buggy when adding new boxes fastly after each other, so I added a small timeout in between (after dropping a new box). Also I noticed that it was a bit boring with only the same boxes, so I added some new “no gravity” boxes. Finally, I’ve cleaned up some minor stuff, added some hints to the main menu and added a simple theme song from a CC0 song.

Next up

• A variety of boxes would be nice: Different shapes and different attributes (no gravity, solid/fixed, inverse gravity,…)
• Also some simple post processing would be awesome, because it changes the look of simple games like this enormously.
• I’m pretty sure the default 2D Unity template doesn’t use URP right now, so migrating this would also be an option.
• Building this for Android and iOS - business as usual: a lot of chores including all the images.