Scaleball

Made originally for the GMTK Game Jam 2024.

Scaleball is a challenging puzzle game about getting a ball to the goal, but you have no control over the ball's motion. You place it down and then you have to let gravity do the rest. In order to make it fit this jam's theme, you can also change the size of the ball before you place it. There are 30 levels to go through, getting progressively harder and harder, with more coming as soon as I can make them.

NOTES:

1. Many levels are possible to beat with less than the object limit, but I felt that it was too hard or annoying to beat them with minimum balls.
2. I have updated the game since the Jam, although you can still play the Game Jam's version in a separate page at https://lemmagamedev.itch.io/scaleball-game-jam-version.
3. The game appears to run much slower if you have low battery and have not plugged in your computer, so if it seems like it's too slow, plug in your computer.
4. Music available at https://soundcloud.com/rangecreator3/sets/scaleball-ost.
5. If anyone manages 500 balls in the bonus level without destroying their computer, congratulations.
6. If you can beat Level 3 without scaling any balls, I will place a secret setting in 1.2 that will unlock in that scenario.
7. Also, please don't ruin the game for new players by posting the answers to the puzzles in the comments. If it happens too much I will disable the comments.

KNOWN BUGS:

This game uses Unity's default physics engine. Because of that, there are several physics bugs that I don't know how to fix. Most of these appear only in the bonus level, as there is no object limit.

1. Creating a tower of balls gets exponentially more laggy as you add more balls. More noticeable with smaller balls.
2. Enough pressure from other balls will cause a ball to be shoved through a gap smaller than it.
3. Because of how I coded portals, they are one-way. Balls cannot travel through them the other way.
4. In addition to that, when a ball enters a portal from the side while moving at a low velocity, you may see it fall downwards through blocks before teleporting to the other portal. In certain cases the ball will fall out of the world and self-destruct before teleporting.
5. I wanted the game to be fully deterministic when I made it, so I capped the framerate to 60fps, and I forced the physics engine to act like it was always running at 60fps. If the game appears slow, then you either have bad framerate or you didn't plug in your computer (see note 3 above).