A Drag on Chaos
This game is from ldjam.com, which is currently unavailable.
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You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive (may not load correctly).
In a hypothetical frictionless universe, a double pendulum is a never-ending source of beautiful chaos in motion.
What a shame that in Unity's 2D physics engine, an unexplained bug causes such a system to lose energy rapidly, dragging it inevitably into a quiet ash-gray stillness. Fortunately for us, the theme makes this bug a feature!
Only you, the player, repeatedly feeding energy into the system by hand, can bring this world to life and hold off its fate.
While this entry may appear at first to be only a toy, it holds several secret challenges for you to discover and complete.
TIPS ON THE CHALLENGES
(very light spoiler warning)
Each challenge will show something yellow when you are moving toward their goal. So keep your eyes out for yellow indicators and try to understand what they might be asking you to do more of.
Double-pendulums are chaos, so even once you understand what you want to do, it's still pretty tough to make the system do your bidding. One tip is that no goal will be solvable from a very low-energy state, so sometimes the best approach to solving the challenges is to load the system up with some energy first and then try to seize opportunities. Another tip is that sometimes a 1-2 punch combo can be an effective way to push the system into new modes, because just a single push gets eaten by friction pretty quickly.
Good luck!
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Dev Notes
This is my 21st Ludum Dare, but this entry brings two firsts that I enjoyed:
This is the first time I have made music for a game, something I have wanted to try for a while.
This is the first time I have used procedural graphics. I used the Shapes package from Freya Holmér, which I so easy to use that I scrapped my graphics completely and used a pure-code approach to all the graphics. It also handle the text and this was the easiest "UI" I've ever made.
The last thing to mention about this entry is that it took the long way around. For a while at the start, it was a WASD platformer where you jumped on the pendulum, and had pixel-art graphics! I had absolutely no idea this Unity bug existed, but once I got dragged into it, I decided that was thematic and leaned in.
I hope you find it interesting! I'm curious how many of the secret challenges you find, and which was the hardest.
What a shame that in Unity's 2D physics engine, an unexplained bug causes such a system to lose energy rapidly, dragging it inevitably into a quiet ash-gray stillness. Fortunately for us, the theme makes this bug a feature!
Only you, the player, repeatedly feeding energy into the system by hand, can bring this world to life and hold off its fate.
While this entry may appear at first to be only a toy, it holds several secret challenges for you to discover and complete.
TIPS ON THE CHALLENGES
(very light spoiler warning)
Each challenge will show something yellow when you are moving toward their goal. So keep your eyes out for yellow indicators and try to understand what they might be asking you to do more of.
Double-pendulums are chaos, so even once you understand what you want to do, it's still pretty tough to make the system do your bidding. One tip is that no goal will be solvable from a very low-energy state, so sometimes the best approach to solving the challenges is to load the system up with some energy first and then try to seize opportunities. Another tip is that sometimes a 1-2 punch combo can be an effective way to push the system into new modes, because just a single push gets eaten by friction pretty quickly.
Good luck!
---
Dev Notes
This is my 21st Ludum Dare, but this entry brings two firsts that I enjoyed:
This is the first time I have made music for a game, something I have wanted to try for a while.
This is the first time I have used procedural graphics. I used the Shapes package from Freya Holmér, which I so easy to use that I scrapped my graphics completely and used a pure-code approach to all the graphics. It also handle the text and this was the easiest "UI" I've ever made.
The last thing to mention about this entry is that it took the long way around. For a while at the start, it was a WASD platformer where you jumped on the pendulum, and had pixel-art graphics! I had absolutely no idea this Unity bug existed, but once I got dragged into it, I decided that was thematic and leaned in.
I hope you find it interesting! I'm curious how many of the secret challenges you find, and which was the hardest.