Gameplay

ozroc on 2010/08/24 13:47 of Lyapunov's game

In fact this will be some kind of a billiard game with simple rules. One blue ball and two red ones. You shoot with the blue one and have to kick each of the other ones with it (2 points) or kick one making it kick the other one (1 point).

For shooting, you will simply point and click. How hard you kick is inversely proportional to how long the pointing line is (lighter red line means also harder kick). This makes as much difficult to make an accurate kick as much harder you want to kick. Just like in real life ;-)

I have simple but enough realistic punctual particle kinematics in a square billiard. In next stages there will be a stadium, a Sinai and maybe some other fancy shapes as a cardioid, a mushroom or so.

For more information about chaotic billiards, you can take a look at wikipedia.

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Comments

ozroc on 2010/08/24 14:57:

First playable version up!

Just first stage (rectangular billiard) but complete (maybe buggy) dynamics and rules.

Cosmologicon on 2010/08/24 15:08:

Nice job! It seems pretty hard already. I'm looking forward to the strange attractors and things you can actually get caught in. Just be sure to give the players lots of lives. :)

Despite having seen Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land, I found the best strategy for me was just to hit it really hard toward one ball and hope for the best. You know, because of the sensitivity to initial conditions and all.

The only thing I would say, from a gameplay point of view, is it takes a little too long for the balls to roll to a stop. Maybe let me click to skip to the end of the shot.

ozroc on 2010/08/24 15:16:

I think an important part of the game is to follow the trajectories of the balls. Maybe they're a bit boring with this rectangular shape, but they'll have interest in next stages... and I think jumpìng to the end of the movement can be confusing.

Thank you for the comment.

Cosmologicon on 2010/08/24 15:19:

Oh yes that makes sense. I definitely don't think you should skip the trajectories. I'm just talking about the last 5 seconds of movement or so when the balls are going very slowly and it's obvious where they're going to end up. Maybe I'm just impatient.

ozroc on 2010/08/24 15:24:

OK, I agree with that. I'll try to make them stop faster without appearing unrealistic.