Chaos Theory

by necauqua

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.89

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.57

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★4.27

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.23

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.98

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.08

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.07

This is a tiny game which answers the question 'could you gamify the double/multi pendulum simulator?'

The answer is yes, definitely, you can gamify absolutely anything, lol.

It's pretty simple, and this time I did a proper (more or less) in-game tutorial, so click the link and enjoy - or not, heheh, the game is not for everyone I guess. Also luck is involved.

I spent way too little time on it this time, I think the entirety of this could be done in like one day (not even two), but I had like 5-6 hrs/day spent on it 🤷

#### Physics are broken!!1!
Due to a little misunderstanding during the jam, the pendulums are _super_ heavy, and the system loses energy due to simulation precision, there is no dampening, only 100g of gravity :) The levels then were designed around the current behavior, so I am not fixing it until after the jam because current levels are way too easy with pendulums that behave more realistically.

#### Credits
Background music is Wave by Alfred Grupstra from Pixabay

Comments14

marrs5 Oct 2021, 09:17

I thoroughly enjoyed this physics puzzler! Great job also on explaining the mechanics in-game. Proud to share the same title with you! :)

Gus Goucher5 Oct 2021, 18:53

What a cool concept! I was just messing around with this myself, but never thought to make it into a game! It's really nicely laid out and the colors are well chosen, excellent work!

Amolker5 Oct 2021, 19:01

Very inventive use of the theme. Very good submission.

joaosilva225 Oct 2021, 19:03

The game looks great! Unfortunately I could not develop an intuition to solve these puzzles, which left me guessing all the time. Fun nonetheless!

nardandas6 Oct 2021, 20:50

Really cool use of the theme! I made a pendulum solver for my game as well, but only ended up using a single pendulum. I thought the damping was a bit much, energy decayed very rapidly.

eptwalabha6 Oct 2021, 20:57

Very cool concept, music, game.
I wish there were more levels to play. I manage to get a +3 on one of the target.
Nice job on this submission

necauquaauthor6 Oct 2021, 22:19

@nardandas funniest thing is that the pendulum is just a rope (verlet+jacobi), so 'energy decay' is from high gravity, which is so high only for it not to be horribly slow on 60 fps

@eptwalabha thanks! I'm planning to make a level editor, I've enough interested people in my discord to make a few dozens of levels at least :)

Not to mention a ton of fixes/improvements that I have to do

Kaiomoi7 Oct 2021, 16:17

Nice use of the theme. I really like the curves created by the hangers, it's almost hypnotic.

But it's a bit complicated for me xD

congratulations

BluishGreenPro7 Oct 2021, 21:35

Took a little bit of time to understand the intricacies of the simulation, but pretty neat once you figure it out!

zimny1112 Oct 2021, 23:21

I like simulation of multi pendulum and I must admit I never though that I will ever see a game about it! Interesting game concept. The music is nice too. Good Job.

Hawkin13 Oct 2021, 12:34

The progression of the tutorial was the perfect pace. I appreciated the thought you put into that! The visual and sonic scape were perfect to sit back and relax to.

By the way, this has a very similar look and feel to an orbital sim I made for LD47! Clearly I'm a fan of sims, so this game was right up my alley :) It's interesting how non-deterministic the system is, but that's pendulums for you! The difficulty curve scaled pretty quickly, so I admittedly cheesed one of the levels. The physics went way out of whack with so many levers >:)

Misfire_dev21 Oct 2021, 12:29

Really fun and weird game :D its always fun to try and break a physics simulation as well, it ends up 100% unstable, great job :D

LCStark21 Oct 2021, 13:20

Making a puzzle game out of chaos theory? Why not! There is something zen-like about watching those shapes appear on screen. It was a great idea to add a soft-reset, but leave the previously drawn path on screen.

LDJam user 25910321 Oct 2021, 18:46

Really enjoyed this one! The aesthetics were nice and clean, and the tutorial was really helpful. Quite fun to play too!

Nice work :)

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