Catch the Falling Things

Interesting physicsy gameplay. I think the bodies were set to be too light with too little friction. Kind of impossible to get over about 7 bodies stacked. The foundation for a fun game though - well done. BTW, I was occasionally getting terrible framerate (0.5FPS), and a profile just showed all the time in the Box2D solver. Not sure if you saw that at all yourself.

Thanks for the comment, ovenchips! The performance drop you witnessed was a defect in the game that has now been fixed (after the competition has ended).

I would have liked to spend more time tuning the physics, but I was working on a pretty strict timebox and ran out of time. I'm happy with the seed here, though, and maybe I'll trick it out over the summer.

The gameplay is a little bit random, tho it is probably just me not able to find a way to play reasonably. Nice mood and feel tho.

Well, not bad! My top score was 32 seconds. Here's my screenshot (I did manage to get more than 7 things on the platform!):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107314069/screenshots/catchthefallenthings.png
The best strategy I could find was to leave the platform in approximately one place (moving it by no more than 5 pixels or so) the whole time. It made for a "watch and cheer it on" kind of gameplay, but it was still satisfying when I broke 30 seconds.

One easy tweak you could try - if there was 100% friction (i.e. no sliding on the platform), this would be an interesting variation on Tetris.

Good idea of using the physics for gameplay, however tweaking the parameters a bit would help the game a lot, currently keeping stuff on top of the platform is just too hard.

Good base idea. Physics need to be stickier/heavier. I found it really hard to keep anything caught on the platform. Polish it up some more (physics are a pain to get right).