Rollslop

by kaliuresis

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.35

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.40

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.67

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.03

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.15

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.05

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.79

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.19

Katamari crossed with a survivor-like. Roll around and collect items to grow bigger and stronger. Survive for 5 minutes to face the final boss.
I ran out of time to add an end screen, but after you kill the boss that is the end.

Play here (has some post-jam bugfixes): https://kaliuresis.itch.io/rollslop

Post-jam Bug Fixes (3 hours after deadline)

The original version (which is the one embedded on this page) had a bug where the physics break from float overflow when the scale gets too large, which typically happens around 3:00 min in. The version on itch fixes this.

Tools

Made in javascript & C compiled to wasm. It is compiled with no enscripten and no C standard library to keep the build light-weight and compile times fast. There are still some rough points to smooth out, but I think I'm settling in on a toolset I like for game jams.

Audio is procedurally generated in the game code.

Models are made in blender, then embedded into the wasm file.

Retrospective

I slightly overscoped, mainly because I decided to do the physics from scratch instead of using an existing physics engine. Luckily I was able to get something playable with an extra day and submit for the jam instead of compo.

The physics ended up taking a majority of the time, but I did try some new things that I learned from. Instead of storing velocity and angular velocity of physics bodies, I decided to internally store their momentum angular momentum. I think this worked out pretty well and I think it is probably the correct choice. I also tried making more use of linked lists, rather than flat arrays with an id lookup table like I normally use. I don't think the linked list method is outright better or worse, but it does have some nice aspects like keeping pointers stable and the ability to have many distinct lists share underlying data. I probably should be using linked lists more in my main projects.

If I decide to make another 3d game for a jam I should probably try learning godot or something. I love making my own engines, but it would be nice to see how pre-made engines feel to use.

Tags: #3d, #physics, #survivor-like

Genres: action

Tools: Blender, Godot

Comments16

LDJam user 2792336 Oct 2025, 23:24

Very intuitive and Good use of the theme. I had fun! I can't tell if this is a bug, feature, or something I hallucinated, but I think I died once and after the game over screen came up, the momentum of enemies hitting my body pushed me into a heart and the game went back to normal game-play 🤣

kaliuresisauthor7 Oct 2025, 01:25

@noobman64 Thanks! The reviving was intentional since I like hidden "life after game over" mechanics, although it probably needs to be rebalanced since if you just wait around long enough you're pretty likely to have a heart spawn near you.

mackain7 Oct 2025, 20:26

really fun game! katamari + vibes!
the game is crazy difficult in the beginning, or maybe im just bad at it :P still really cool!

Jimbly7 Oct 2025, 22:24

Neat! I found it very difficult, after a dozen or so tries, I survived about a minute at most :laughing:. Also, pre-made engines are overrated ;).

Macron20 Oct 2025, 20:39

Oh, another survivor-like! I liked the physics-basedness of it, though I found it difficult to stay alive longer than a minute despite playing for over 10 minutes. Something I'd say would make it easier to play would be health pickups (after the starting 2), as often I did lose one or two HP at the start of the game, resulting in even good runs being one mistake from death.

kaliuresisauthor20 Oct 2025, 21:24

@macron There actually are more health pickups, but I probably made them a bit too rare. It seems the general sentiment is that the game is a bit too hard. I still get surprised how much my perception of a game's difficulty gets warped by having made it, even when I try to account for that bias.

Jokku21 Oct 2025, 07:26

Interesting tech stack behind the game! Loads super fast so that is nice compared to unity web builds :) Core idea is fun but quite hard. I like the idea of using colorful graphics, but at least on my screen slightly more brightness and saturation would be nice. Physics from scratch is really impressive, so extra points for that.

FiveCyclops21 Oct 2025, 15:17

We had thought of the same thing, but adding Vampire Survivor-style weapons is a great idea.

Fiordarancio21 Oct 2025, 17:11

This is a very cool game! I easily found myself looking to those skulls in anger :laughing: the gameplay though is very fluid so I didn't find it too frustrating. It's a nice take on the theme!

logicalinsanity21 Oct 2025, 17:15

This is great. I had a similar starting thought but landed on a much worse implementation in only 2D haha.

Kahztein21 Oct 2025, 17:38

Pretty fun game! You did a great job on the physics for something made from scratch for the jam. I appreciate seeing people making more technical ideas like this within such a short timeframe.

Myst21 Oct 2025, 18:13

Objectively this game is probably a bit too difficult, but the difficulty makes it very chaotic and almost comedic at times, so I kind of love it. (I particularly love the way certain ghosts will just aggressively drift around you while you're desperately trying to not die). However, I do kind of wish there was a score counter of some kind so that I could see how big my ball got or how long I survived.

johnnysix21 Oct 2025, 19:54

This was really cool - maybe a little more time at the beginning to get your bearings before being swamped by prawns and ghosts would be good. I had several rounds where I'd die before I could grab the second heart :scream:

Since it's your own engine and all the physics stuff was done from scratch it's very impressive! Something cool to see , if you added more to it , would be more things that spawn after the initial patch ( or maybe they do but I died to soon?! ) - and maybe more complex stuff, like building a 'worm' shaped katamari to traverse different terrain or similar. Though the level of control would probably preclude deliberately building your player into a specific shape! :smile:

FiveCyclops21 Oct 2025, 22:44

I think you should try testing and rating about 20 games to increase your Karma and make your game more visible, so that other players can test it.

LDJam user 41635122 Oct 2025, 08:24

That's an awesome game! It's a shame that it didn't get enough ratings so far. I think the above commentor is right, you needed to rate other people games. I'm pretty sure, if this game gets into the resulting list, it should be somewhere in high ups.

It's really hard in the beginning, but as you grasp the idea that you need to become a "ball of death" as soon as possible, it becomes understandable how to win. Thus I managed to survive till the end of timer couple times, however, I still didn't understand the final boss. It seemed like some "pillars of fire" randomly appearing nearby or I don't know what was that, but I didn't get how you kill that. So after dying a couple times, I gave up unfortunately =)

Others above already appreciated that, and I, as a programmer myself, applaud that you decided to make your own physics and succeeded in it in such a short timeframe, that's really impressive! I always wanted to dig into physics myself, never found time to do it, but I'll do at some point.

Also, can you please tell what you used for rendering? I checked the source code, but didn't manage to find anything related to graphics, though I looked too quickly.