roBurky made a thing: Three Body Problem

I made a thing, everybody! It's called Three Body Problem, and it's my first real attempt at making a challenging high score game.

I’m quite pleased to finally release it. I think I've been rather ridiculously perfectionist about it, for such a small game. It spent about a year just sitting on my hard drive, practically finished, just waiting to be given a name. You can thank Martin Hollis for finally providing the title that enabled me to let it go.

I have a web player for it on my own site, and download versions, but I'm also trying out hosting on kongregate, which has given me a quick and easy online high score table.

My high score is 8.

Reported!

Eh, I mean congratulations. I shal try and then fail at this.


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Edit: Your game is a smug bastard and it's mocking me. I now hate you.
But it looks gorgeous. And you need an IOS version stat - don't give away, what you deserve to make a buck on.

That's a great little game. Needs gamepad support!

I don't think I'll ever be good at this - but I agree with Chris. Great little game and very hard to control.

My high score is... 2. *sob* I am traumatized by love how the trail of my previous failed run remains when the new game starts, almost like a bloodstain mocking my utter incompetence at this game.

Also I like how the person with the highest score at this game on Kongregate isn't roBurky.

This thing is brutal, I had five games after that one where I managed no points at all.

High score now 11.

Roburky, this is fantastic! Congratulations! I had no idea you'd been working on a game, that's really awesome!

get xbox controller hooks into the executable, and I'll pay you for this even though you gave it away for free as well.

I love how it mocks me every time I die. I kinda felt like a bullfighter.

I actually was going "olé, olé!" until my smugness got me killed.

Unsure about this. I generally feel that touchscreens aren't best suited to games about directing an avatar's movement. There's also barriers of cost and needing a mac to release on ios. I highly doubt it would actually sell well enough to justify doing it for the money.
Android does look significantly cheaper, though, so I may try that out, just for the learning experience of implementing touchscreen controls.

This I shall definitely do.

Stuck at 11... DARK SOULS

It only took 8 hours from it first going live for someone to dethrone me.

Although: what score does it show me as having? I scored 40 with the stat-tracker running before I published it, but I saw someone else mention me having a score of 30-something, so I'm wondering if I'm the only one who can see my pre-publish score.

That's strange; I'm seeing 40, myself. And eight hours? That's really impressive. At the rate I'm going I'd be lucky to even reach 4.

Great Googly Moogly! Congrats, ey! This is awesome. *goes to play*

ETA: AHMAHGADZ I LOVE THE NAAAAAAME /totally forgot to add that previously

ETA2: This is a very absorbing and addictive game that is just about my target type niche. D:

Nice game. Like others, I'd love gamepad support. Only got to 5 in the few minutes I played, but I want to play more, so that's a good sign.

Roburky, I want you to know that I hate you.

Also my high score is 40. So I'm tied with you on Kongregate and thus in second place! As soon as this game has controller support I'll probably crack 100, just because I can finally apply too many years dodging missiles in Ace Combat games properly, but for now, I think I'll quit at tying you at your own game.

By the way, what the fuck happens to the AI at 25? It seems like the turning radius really drops and the acceleration really ramps up.

Well, 4 is a number. It is my number.

Great work, RoBurky.

Wow. Well done!

There is a very slight increase to the whole game speed for every point past a certain reasonably high threshold. Hopefully you're only noticing the accumulated change, because there shouldn't be any noticeable jump.

It's possible it just hits the point of being notable around 25. It seems like a more distinct jump, though, than it did at 30+. Sudden enough that the majority of my failures come under 10 in the setup phase (aka, getting the two yellows in a predictable pattern), or at 28 or 29. Whether it's just hitting critical mass or it's a function of the math, I've no idea.

Oh, and if you end up making a download version or XBL indie game or whathaveyou, FUCKING SOLD.

I love this idea of the clipped trail being like a bloodstain.
You've now got me thinking about emphasising that through things like making the trail remain on screen for longer after death.

Actually, it's possible you may be right. It's really difficult to judge, and I can't find any mention of it through google, but it might be that changes to unity's timescale don't have any effect at a finer scale than 10%. A score of 25 would be the point where the accumulated changes hit that threshold, making it jump from 1x speed to 1.1x speed.

But as I say, I'm not totally sure, because while I can notice that a 10% increase has happened, its not great enough for me to be sure if I'm seeing it jump.

Also I beat your score.

Simple and fun, nice work, and thanks for pimpin' it. Do you feel like you have a good handle on Unity now?

Aw man, I managed 21 29!

I kinda like this, very simple but hard! I agree with Zeke, the speed seems to change drastically at 25.

I love the ascending tone that of success that sounds on hitting a square. When you get a few in a row quickly it really ramps up the tension.

Edit: The "You Did Well" message is much more frustrating than all the "Pow" "Boom" and "You made a mistake"s combined. Especially when you just spent 5 minutes failing to make it past 5 after getting to 15. Great.

My scores went 0, 0, 1 (I finally figured out the point) 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 22, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 4.

So.

Holding steady at 22.

Damn, this game's tough!

Fun, though. One of these times I might even get a higher than single-digit score! XD

The sound is decent, sometimes makes me think tis purring. OH and I haven't gotten above double digits.

/this thread title has conditioned me to feel like i should be petting the game because "roburky made a thing d'aaaawwww"

When I added the game over messages, I was initially keeping them to non-judgemental statements about the game ending. "Game over", "The end", "death", and so on, because my instinct is always to avoid telling players what they should be doing, and let them decide for themselves what they want their goal to be. I tried to avoid using the word "score" for quite a while too. Then somewhere in there while trying to improve the message variety, I added "failure". And it all kind of slipped from there. "You suck" was in there at one point, but I've dialed it back a lot since then.

I think "You did well" is probably the worst offender still in there. It disguised itself and avoided the authorities by trying to appear positive.

Yeah, I'm getting very confident with Unity now. I've built up a set of scripts now that make quickly knocking together 2D physicsy games like this pretty easy. I haven't got good systems for turn-based figured out, though, which is a shame, because that's what I'm mostly getting ideas for at the moment, and it takes me forever to find out if they're going to be fun.

4.

I feel like the high variance and the frequency of people getting 0s after their high scores indicates there's way more luck than skill (even if there's little actual randomness).

I don't understand the point of the scrolling.

I like how when you're dead they "attack" each other (compare to all the professional games that have shipped where the death cam shows enemy monsters continuing to attack the dead player).

There's some luck, but really, there's a massive learning curve more than anything else. Just learning how to get off the ground is very difficult (down to the second to last block, stop, back up so the enemies colide and there's room to shoot through them and around to the first target. Do it right and the trails look like an ass in boyshorts), and then you have to learn the movement patterns and speeds and most importantly, patience.

I hit 20-ish reliably. The AI is brilliant at predicting where you're going to be, rather than chasing where you are. IE, it's not chasing, it's intercepting. So the trick is to never be where you're going. Be erratic, lead the AI on, make it miss you rather than you missing it, and do NOT get close when it slows down. It's counter-intuitive, but you're safest when it's fastest. If it's slow, it'll get a tight turn and accelerate right into you if you're close. If it's zipping around, you can work within a much more predictable curve to stay in a safe area.

Sometimes, it's better to dodge for a moment or two, let the AI get into more uniform movement, THEN hit the target. Don't just charge in and get whacked when you could wait 5 seconds and have a safe shot at it.

"Oh well". You are so mean! I love this!

On the one hand, I love this game. On the other hand, I like roBurky less.

One of the players I've been talking to on twitter has been recording themselves play, and just beat my score.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CslRnSq1AVo

13,500 seconds of gameplay = he deserves it! Damn that's awesome.

Good stuff roBurky. It's fun!
My highest is 27.

Your game is now in my tab, you magnificent bastard.