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Entanglement by benheck, AndyLeq, FlamesGoWhoosh, ggui1213
When the jam started, all teams were given the prompt “The Rope and The Stick”. Our team interpreted the prompt fairly literally and began to come up with game mechanics centered around actual ropes and sticks. Eventually, we landed on the idea of being tied to a stick by a rope and having to move around a space where your rope can get caught on objects.
As the artists started working on an art style for the game, we settled on a cute aesthetic with a yarn ball player character where the rope would be yarn and the sticks would be sewing needles. The other programmer and I got to work prototyping some of the basic rope physics we would need. It was challenging to develop a system that would behave intuitively, interact with objects, and hold the player back when they reached the end of their rope without constantly dragging the player back when the rope was slack.
Ultimately, we developed a chain link of segments with colliders, bound together with DistanceJoint2D components. I spent a lot of time tweaking and fine-tuning the movement parameters, rigidbody masses, and forces to foster non-abrasive movement while still maintaining the important rope length restriction.
I also spent a decent amount of time working on the UI panel in the bottom right that holds a bunch of loose yarn. This UI feature works to communicate how long your current yarn strand is by adding more yarn to the container when you collect buttons. The visual seems simple, but behind the scenes there is a 3D rope being generated and added to that falls down into a container. This 3D motion is captured by an orthographic camera outputting to a render texture with a transparent background. This render texture is then overlaid on top of the 2D art of the UI slot. I wanted to capture the 3D effect that rope has when it piles and runs over and under itself, as if someone were virtually dropping more yarn into the slot. The effect is subtle, but I feel that the extra amount of polish and motion improves the feel of the game slightly.
When time was up, our team met up with the other teams for us all to play each other’s games and provide feedback. Some of the NYU Game Center professors served as the judges. In the end, our team won the jam! Players really enjoyed the simplicity of the concept and its intuitive execution. The professors complimented its level of polish for the short time constraint as well as our ability to efficiently work as a team.
