CubeBallFall

This works quite well. For only one level I am surprised by how much you can fit on one cube!
Game plays pretty well, one thing I would change is making the ball feel a bit heavier. It currently bounces around like a ping pong ball a bit and can be slow to follow your movement.
Other than that it was really good, bet you could come up with some cool levels and mechanics for this if you were to expand on it. Maybe have the ball fall through the cube and out the other side or something like that.
Anyway, great job!

Thanks, them ideas were exacly what i wanted to do with this, sadly time didn't allow for this.
Deffo thinking of taking this on to greater things ;)

Hello,
i can totally agree to Ztuu that the physics are too much like a ball that bounces of the walls too much and that there might be some mechanics lacking. But its only the first level so… A good idea with a pretty good execution. I also like the background.
Greetings

Good concept and well executed. The graphics are very minimalistic and the music is really good ( but a bit short and repetetiv). There are really great ideas in this level design but my ball just glitched through the cubes and I made it this way through this obstacle. Also is the ball maybe a bit too light, because it falls really slow and is bouncing almost the whole time. I had really fun playing your game and was happy to beat it. Good Job :)

Good Game with a good implementation of the theme falling. Always Improve your game dev skills.

#DoNotShakeYourCube

Loved it, had a great laugh when I shook the cube to make the ball go through and everything exploded.
The controls are not really intuitive.

Continue like that, it was a great first jam.

haha, @Lokior I was wondering if anyone would do that, i noticed it while i was testing and getting frustrated, it gave me an idea of a way to actually make that a feature like totally shatter and crumble the whole maze and make you restart if you put for much force in to it. sadly like many iof my ideas with this game there was simply not enough time to get them in there.

Glad you enjoyed it.

And thank you all for the reviews/comments, Im so happy you have all seemed to enjoy it!

A rule of thumb I like to use for small games is "Don't use physics". Like, if there's a library for physics in the environment you're using, ignore it. Stay away. It seems like an easy way to avoid writing code, but it causes a lot more headaches when you're trying to fix bugs down the line - like the fact the ball can very easily clip through walls, bounce to a random spot, or fly out of the box entirely. And though it may seem daunting at first, a simple physics system for a rolling ball really isn't that difficult to build.

With that in mind: I really like the design of this game. The level has some great ideas, it's the right length, and showcases the mechanics well. The whole thing feels very calming and meditative. If the physics were a bit more predictable I would really enjoy playing a larger version of this for an hour or so.

Small changes you could make without rewriting the physics system:

keep the ball attached to the block when it's being rotated. At the moment the ball is completely independent and relies on subtle movements and physics to stay in the right spot. If you keep the ball rotating together with the block (either through unreal's system - parent the ball to the block - or through a bit of trig) you can prevent a lot of the clipping issues. The purple rectangles could follow the same logic.

Simplify the controls. let Q/E rotate the block clockwise/counterclockwise on the screen. make the block better follow the mouse when left/right clicking. One approach would be to make the board reset when the player isn't pressing buttons to have one face flat on top, then WASDQE would only rotate along one of the orthogonal axes…

It's not a bad effort for your first game, by any stretch. I hope you will continue to create games for future jams. Just trying to help you see some other paths to go down when building this sort of thing.

Never seen a puzzle like this one in a jam; multiple times in real-life though. Functional and thematic enough, there ought to be many projects revolving around gravity.

Points for the funky background, the name and the tagline!

Played the Web version in Firefox on Linux. There are a few differences to the Windows version, as far as I can tell based on your decription and the title image up top. First, a lack of shadows rendering the geometry hard to parse from most angles. Second, I heard no music at all!

Regardless of the web specific issues, the controls are slightly unintuitive. I think this is down to three issues:

1. There are no visual gizmos to interact with. The current freedrag global rotations are easy to mess up as both X and Y axis movements add together. Gizmos, such as those in most 3D editors, would help a lot.

2. The right mouse button rotation works as intended when moving the cursor horizontally, but does the same thing as left mouse button when moving vertically. It should probably do the same thing for both, or do nothing for vertical movement.

3. Light ball and low gravity. Requires extra patience and movements to get it rolling.

In conclusion: good effort for a first jam project; the technical and input problems are unfortunate. I'm unfamiliar with the engine, does it have a native Linux build option?

Supercool idea, gameplay, graphics, music. However I couldn't figure out how to move the camera, and physics was little bit unpredictable. I really liked your game though)

Cool idea! I feel like it was a bit janky in the controls tho. Also it had no sound when played through web browser. But the idea is good, and definitly something you could take further! :-)

@amras0000 i started with UE4 blank game and no starter content. its as basic as i know how to start off a project, it has some physics, how to tinker with that is on my todo list. especially for the clipping issue. deffo gonna look in to that for the next project or this if i take it further.

If i do i will deffo throw in the Q/E controls and see about giving it an overhaul, maybe specific X,Y and Z rotation markers.

@huvaakoodia yea the web version is deffo not as good as the windows one, why and how to fix that i dont know. if you can play windows its deffo a better experiance.

like i said above i will look in to gizmos/markers to help make the rotations easier and understandable. part of my testing had unseen issues on web that wernt there on windows, may even have to pull it 

the sound is odd it worked on my initial play on the web version. whats the OS and BROWSER you are using? ill look in to it.

@overf10w there is no movable camera lol

@jlindskov yeah im hearing many issues on the browser front :(

thank you all for playing and taking the time to comment!

i may pull the web version and see if unreal can build linux/mac from windows. - not sure how that is RE Alakajam rules? can i do rebuilds bug fixes at this stage?

thanks again guys!

The game seems fun, if my ball didn't get launched into space most of the time.

Maybe you should consider the camera angle? Since the game is about gravity, most of the time the ball will be on the bottom of the cube and it's impossible to see where it is going.

Note: this is for the WebGL version

I'm always a sucker for these types of gravity based puzzles. I like your idea, your take on the theme and most parts of the execution.

However, the controls are pretty difficult. Manipulating an object in 3D space is always hard, I guess. But when the mouse reached the edge of the frame, I lost the ability to manipulate. Letting go of the mouse button had unpredictable effects (sometimes it stuck). This is probably better in full screen mode, but I could not find an option for that.

Finally, depending on the orientation of the cube/camera, the cube can look solid white (you don't see the walls any more, most likely due to the lighting.

Good entry as is, would have been great if it was a little easier to control.

• audio did not work on my MacBook Pro in Firefox or Safari, so did not rate that.

@Rando
Firefox (62.0.3) on Linux (Mint 18.3), as, less specifically, stated before.

Tried Chrome and, sure enough, audio worked. I've actually had this issue before on some titles; forgot Firefox fails or rare occasions.

I like the music!

Simple and original. Good game keep up the good work, and good call with adding a browser one as well, makes this game very accesable.

Well done! Especially for a first game. My main complaint is with the physics of the ball, as it basically feels like a balloon. I really liked the style, with the background music and the backgroud art. Also, The progressing difficulty as you made your way through the maze felt really good. Solid entry overall!

A neat bit of trickery that shows you that dressing up a concept as old and tired as a maze can still work very well if the 'dress' is nice enough. Not just the concept of wrapping it around the cube, but in more literal ways as well, like the music and visuals (which is mostly the background, transparancy and minimalism, but it works). Which I enjoyed a good deal!

As I keep saying; also a fan of on-screen instructions, though it took me a while to get what you meant with the 'WASD' controls, as I thought the '+' was just a way to sum the different control mechanisms, instead of an indication that you had to have one of the mouse-buttons pressed.

Now that I'm on the subject anyway, I think I figured out what makes the right mouse button controls feel a little wobbly. As you never really move the mouse in a completely straight line, the rotation will always be a little bit over both axis (axii? axises?). This isn't a problem for the left mouse button, as this operation results in a rotation about a single axis, but if you mix directions (up-down vs. left-right) for the right one, you get something that isn't a single rotation about a single axis anymore (I think…).

I mostly 'solved' the cubes by allowing the ball to clip through them … on the other hand in both situations, clipping through the cubes also prevented the ball from falling in the hole/exit when I tried it fairt and square :-)

(Oh, one other thing: If you zip multiple items again, could you put them in a map before packing? Otherwise it will just spew the files all over the folder you happen to unpack in.)

Anyway, keep up the good work, it's impressive that you managed it within 28 hours for your first jam while struggeling with an engine (I know hat that last part feels…)

P.S. Rebuilds are explicitly allowed by the rules, as long as nothing is changed of course (well, except for the other exceptions, like easily fixed completely game-breaking bugs). See here under the header 'What is allowed', the second sub-item of the last bullet-point under the 'Solo/Team divisions' sub-header.

Played only the web version. Neat concept! Great music for a jam game, and awesome psychedelic art style.

Mouse sensitivity seems a bit annoyingly slow. Would be better if the rotation speed of the cube matched the speed of the mouse cursor, so that (at least near the middle) the cursor movement lines up with the cube's movement.

I also wanted some camera controls, to look around without affecting the ball, but maybe not having those is part of the fun.

This was an interesting interpretation of the theme. Unfortunately, I can't say the game itself is that original as I've seen quite a few games that use a very similar concept. I still found it fascinating that the game was as long as it was with how small the cube seemed. The music was nice, but the visuals could use some work. My one major complaint is that the controls felt pretty bad. For some reason WASD didn't do anything for me. I don't know if that was a bug or not. I think it would've been a lot nicer if you used just the left mouse button and A and D to rotate or if you used QWEASD to rotate in every direction using the keyboard to eliminate the mouse entirely. It was rather hard to get the cube to move the way I wanted it to sometimes.

Nice work though!

I really like this. It reminds me of those toys I had as a kid where you would have to roll a marble down a maze inside a sphere. I also really like the music, sounds really nice :)

Interesting idea! I had a lot of fun with it, although at times the ball's physics seemed a bit wonky.

I played the web version and the controls were a little iffy, but I liked the game idea.