Unity 3D: Rollmites

Rollmites is the name of a game project I started after college. A Rollmite is a little robotic creature that rolls into a ball and transforms into various forms. Rollmites live in an abstract world built out of pinball and pachinko parts.

Rollmites is a 3d action puzzle game that plays like a cross between mini-golf and pinball. To play the game you start by powering up its rocket booster, aiming, and launching it into the air, it then curls into a ball and moves like a pinball. You must try to destroy all the enemies on the playfield, which stand in different places kind of like the different holes on a golf course. When you destroy an enemy you gain its power. Each enemy represents a type of movement.  When you gain a power, you can only use it for a set amount of time before you return to your ball form. Each power is a different form that moves in a unique way: Jumping into the air, rolling like a wheel, bouncing like a top and drilling into the ground, gliding like a paper airplane, and flying like a jet. Powers can be used one after the other to advance the rollmite around the field. For example you might activate jump and launch upward, then active glide and glide downward towards an enemy, then smash through that enemy, gaining wheel power and using it to spin up a hill towards another enemy, and so on.

Jump man

Flying man

Roller man

The game is turn based, when the rollmite stops moving the turn is over, you do not have direct control over the rollmite and must aim it carefully and use the powerups you gain at the right time and in the right order to get a high score. It is a fairly unconventional game and really needs to be seen to be understood:

At the end of each turn you lose 1 'battery points'. If you drain your batteries completely you die and must restart the stage. Every time you destroy an enemy you gain 0.5 battery points. Thus it gets harder to survive as you run out of enemies to destroy.
 Once you have destroyed all the enemies and are down to 1 remaining, the remaining enemy turns into a portal that when entered, transports the player to the next stage, or a bonus stage depending on the score.
 The bonus stage is an endlessly long, randomly generated, pachinko machine board that you fall through until you fall into one of the exit portals on the sides of the board. As you fall you can press a button to pulse a force field around you that can push you off of the surrounding surfaces and project yourself in different direction. The goal of the bonus stage is to collect bubbles that float up from the bottom of the screen as you fall. bubbles contain powerups which can be used in the next stage.
Rollmites was a very ambitious project for me and eventually fell by the wayside as I began working full time. It is playable currently but still needs a ton of work.

Board game: Dragon's Gold

I challenged myself to design a board game that was skill based, and used real physics as a game play mechanic. I started the design process by gathering a bunch of small objects of various shapes and sizes and a chess board. I had chess pieces, marbles, wooden cubes, and a pile a change. I sat there and played with the different objects, like a kid might do, just observing how they moved and interacted. I would try to get something interesting to happen, and then make up rules. I stacked a bunch of quarters and flicked another quarter at the stack and saw that I could knock quarters out of the stack without knocking the whole stack over. I kept flicking coins at the stack, knocking out one after the other, and it got shorter and shorter. Sometimes the stack would shift when a coin was knocked out, becoming unstable, so that on the next flick of the coin it would topple over. There was enough happening here to make a whole game around it I thought. I would gradually refine the rules and game board over about 8 months.

The game board went through many redesigns and name changes. I was originally calling it stack attack, then column crash, dueling column, then finally dragon's gold.

The first board was drawn and colored by hand using drafting tools. I used the cardboard back of a sketch pad. I then bought a sheet of clear vellum and some decorative wood trimming to make the board. The glue I used to paste the vellum to the board, melted the marker color and smudged it pretty badly once I had glued it down. I might have been done with this project but that accident made me want to remake the whole thing digitally and not worry about messing up many hours worth of work.

And Here's the redesign I did with Inkscape, which is basically an open-source copy-cat of Illustrator. I got the graphic printed as a laminated poster and pasted it to a wooden board. I then added wooden walls around the center region (painted bright green) to keep the coins from flying off the board.

Up until this point I had not considered selling the game, but people seemed to really like playing it so I had to think about how a consumer who has never met me might think of the game. My art style and theme choices were basically whatever I though looked cool and I had little regard for creating a coherent theme or visual narrative. So the next thing to do was to come up with a story for what was happening in the game. This would mean I would have to, yet again, redesign the game board...

I drew another handmade version of the game, this time on high quality paper, inked it, and scanned it into the computer. I then traced the drawing in Inkscape to come up with what you saw at the start of this post. All in all the project took a huge amount of time, but it was worth it, the final product really does look like something one would buy at a store.