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 :)

Other games by @necauqua

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