Guys™

May 29, 2024

In March of this year, after getting back from GDC, I started a small project to familiarize myself with Unity's Netcode in the hopes of eventually adding online multiplayer to Orbital Tilt. The idea, partly inspired by Blaseball, was to put together a goofy little demo scene where connecting players would spawn in as a featureless capsule with a randomly generated name ([FIRSTNAME] the [ADJECTIVE]).

I posted a screenshot and after a positive response I decided to throw a build up on itch.io and let people in. Over the next few weeks I constantly iterated and expanded the game: adding elements to the environment, creating new name templates, and refining the netcode and physics. Early on I added a leaderboard, mostly as a joke. All it counted was how many seconds a given Guy™ had been alive. Later I added different goals, which the game would randomly cycle between. Thing like "highest altitude", "most consecutive flips", and "most kills".

Over time I fleshed out the visual and mechanical identity of Guys™. Visually, Guys™ is clearly shaped by its original status as a test project composed of the default primitives and shaders Unity provides out of the box, but that's not the whole story. The big turning point in Guys™'s visual identity was when I added wind particles as part of a physics toy. After trying out various semi-transparent sprite particles, I ended up going with opaque white spherical particles. That decision helped crystalize Guys™'s visual identity. It's not about default assets, it's about solid, simple shapes, plain surfaces, and low saturation. As I added more and more custom assets, like the yellow ring indicating which Guys™ is yours, and eventually even a custom model for the crown, that sense of visual identity helped me keep the game looking cohesive.

Mechanically, an environment full of physics toys was a natural way to add interest and variety to the game, starting with hurdles that players could clip after jumping to send their Guys™ tumbling through the air. Pretty early on players were asking for a ragdoll button. The Guys™ are rigid cylinders but when they aren't grounded (according to a raycast from their pivot) they roll and spin freely. I was reluctant to add a ragdoll button for two reasons: first, I didn't want to clutter up the simple move-and-jump (plus a self-destruct button in case you get stuck) controls with a button just for ragdoll. Second, in my experience the humor of a character becoming a physics object wears off much faster when you can make it happen whenever you want. Instead, I added a material to the game that would cause Guys™ to not register as grounded. This satisfied players' desire to let the Guys™ lie down and roll around for longer stretches of time without putting the ability right at their fingertips. Plus, as a bonus, I used the new material to make slides, which turned out to be a lot of fun.