Shuffa ball: Endless Roller

After writing Shuffa ball it gave me the idea for another game. It will be an endless runner style game but with a ball, so I’m calling it Endless Roller.

It will use the same physics as Shuffa ball, but with a play area much, much wider. Endless in fact.

The process of writing this game I’ll document in this blog, most decisions regarding the game I haven’t made yet.

GamePlay

The gameplay is made up of multiple obstacles, when you touch and slide down on an area of the screen; the obstacles come down with you. Then, when you release they snap back into place, applying a force to the ball.  For the obstacles I use object pooling, a number are created at start-up but are inactive. Then when needed they are set as active off screen to the right and move into the frame as the camera follows the ball. Then when they go off screen to the left they are set as not active ready to be reused later.

Click here to see a video of this in action.

The ball tries to maintain a constant velocity, if it is going slower than X then force is added; if faster that is OK, that speed will naturally be lost through bouncing against the obstacles.

I haven’t yet decided on the purpose of the game.

What stops the game, how do you die or run out of time.

What is the goal, is it a distance or completing an action.

Hi scores are they points or time to complete.

Backgrounds

Here it will tile the various backgrounds, as we move to the right it will take the background tile A and place it next to the E.

To do this we need to have a trigger point in each tile that says if the tile goes off screen to the left move it all the way to the right, which will be off camera so we won’t see it happen.

The ball will be followed by the main camera. The tiles in the background will move at a slower speed than the foreground, this is called parallax scrolling.

We can create multiple levels of background, the furthest from the camera being the slowest, nearer the camera progressively faster.

Like Shuffa ball, Endless roller will be written in Unity, here is how the backgrounds look in the Unity editor.

Click here to see the background scrolling in action.

I have a playable demo of the game so far. It is on Game Jolt, I'll be updating this every now and again as this blog progresses.