Perfectly Balanced

Intro

Perfectly Balanced is a physics game about... well... balance. It looks and feels like a simple, relaxing game, but those expectations quickly get shattered as you accumulate more and more weight and panic to rearrange it.

Helpful Hints

- It's a rogue-lite system where the game is impossibly difficult at first, but you earn currency to buy upgrades. Don't give up, it actually gets easier the more you play and upgrade!
- Springs are by far the best upgrade. I suggest upgrading that first! Followed by Sturdiness.
- The game is endless, don't expect to reach an end. Just go until you get a score that you're happy with (there are online leaderboards with detailed stats).
- The block spawning gets more difficult as time goes on, speeding up and introducing new blocks at the 2.5 and 5 minute marks. There are also music changes when you get to those intervals.

Team

- @shohenadel helped generate ideas once the theme of "unstable" was announced. He practically had all the mechanics of the game figured out within half an hour of the announcement.
- @miller1215 wasn't able to join in at the start, but came in big on Saturday with ideas and helped point me in the right direction. The glowing ring wouldn't be in the game without him, which was such a huge upgrade.
- @mhorth the main developer, I've dabbled with game dev for a couple years now as a hobby. I took these guys' ideas and made them reality.

Tools

- Unity
- GIMP and Inkscape for 2D art
- Blender for 3D models (add standard mesh then slap on a bevel :laughing:)
- Audacity for recording and processing sound effects
- Trello for staying organized
- MongoDB for leaderboard

Showcase

A teaser of the current endgame:
https://youtu.be/_UFCHYda8yo

Special Notes

- I have you type in a name so that scores can be submitted to a leaderboard. The name is the only differentiator, so try to pick a unique one. If you and someone else type the same name, the leaderboard will think you're the same person. Sorry!
- I uploaded an HTML build, but the post-processing and the web requests for the leaderboard both broke. I don't want anyone to have to play the game in a reduced quality, so it'll stay Windows only for now. Sorry again!
- In case you're in the mood to grind for a high score, you should know that the supplemental stats on the leaderboard like "tallest height", "blocks lost", etc. don't matter at all for your ranking. It's just the score. Each block has a point value that gets added when it lands, and gets subtracted if it falls off.

Future Plans

- Some of you have mentioned wanting to play the game more to compete for high scores. I'm sorry to say that I don't have a save system for your upgrades, every time you launch the game starts from 0. That's a huge deterrent against further play, so I'll upload a new build once the jam totally ends that will slash the upgrade prices and keep progress between sessions. Thank you for all the encouragement!

Devlog

In case you wanna see how we made a certain part of the game, or if you just like watching devlogs in general, here's a "making of" video:

https://youtu.be/16BjdA0bjIQ