A simple Marble Madness clone with three levels.
Move with the arrow keys, jump with Z and pause with X.
Hope you enjoy it :)
Some things I might add:
- More levels
- More special tiles
- Traditional isometric controls as an option (eg right arrow = move down-right)
Ha, that's great! And I'm terrible at it, which means you pretty much nailed it.
That title screen free rotation hack is nice both on the merits and for the verisimilitude of arcadey false advertising.
beautiful! so hard though! maybe an animation of falling off the edge and maybe be slightly nicer on the edges =)
I like the non-iso controls, they make an imprecision when trying to go NE/NW/SW/SE that feels kinda trackbally. That and the kind of surprising difference between up/down and left/right speeds.
Kind of a nightmare for doing short precision jumping in 2x2 areas, though I guess that's the point. It took me a lllot of tries to clear stage 2, even after I found the invisible floor.
I feel like the floor is one pixel smaller than it should be on the top side? Like, this and this don't seem quite right..
Amazed what the community starts to come up with, and it's even got great music! One thing I'd wish it had would be some kind of dying animation like falling down the level or the ball simply shattering. Simply incredible, though.
Love this. +1 to falling animation, it would lend a touch more realism to the edges without needing to change the tolerances. As is, near misses feel ever so slightly unfair.
Nice! I love the look and feel of the game. I would suggest making the tiles "thick" a little and giving them an edge. Right now they look like they're paper thin.
Great game! Especially loved the title screen and the music. I got used to it, but I also agree with the above that it feels just a little too easy to die.
Here's my scoreboard, still some room for improvement I think :)
I love it! It is pretty diabolically hard. I'd have to go back and play it, but I seem to remember Marble Madness having a little play on the edges where the ball would slow down before falling off.
Great feedback everyone, thanks! My todo list at the moment:
- Add falling animation
- Improve edge detection
- Lenient edge detection or Marble Madness style slipping (edge physics)
- Fix smaller top edge
- Thicker tiles
- Make level 2 a bit easier, probably too hard for the time players should put in!
- Maybe have less consecutive 2x2 platforms
- Maybe have one challenging but time saving route, and a slower but easier one
- Maybe a checkpoint? I'm against this one on the principles of simplicity and difficulty, but it could make things less repetitive and frustrating while still keeping the tough jumps.
@cheepicus That invisible platform was not intentional lol! But I think a similar idea could be good for the level (like the multiple paths idea).
@J That level 2 time is crazy :O
The slower and easier route is a great idea! That would let the player see everything without having to do all the tricky bits the first time through.
Ahahaha, Anastasia pretty much summed up Level 2. Of course, once I beat Level 2, Level 3 wasn't so bad because I had practiced enough to be better at the controls. Still, Level 2 could be just a bit shorter maybe??
Also I think Marble Madness didn't have "edge physics" so much as they had literal ramps that affected the marble physics. Don't know how hard that would be to implement though.
thank you for bringing back all the frustration and sadness from my childhood. ha ha ha. i kid. great game. keep 'em coming!
I've enjoyed this cart so much! Marble Madness was my go to game in the arcade days.
I like the jumping addition from the original.
It would be cool to add the acid and slinky monsters to the levels. Could even add them once players clears the 1st round of levels. Add/extend replay-ability with the existing levels.
Good work, some things may be improved:
- Falling animation
- Edge physics
- We move faster while doing diagonal, that's wrong
- When we do pause, and choose resume, the ball will jump
Great job anyway :)
Fantastic music, I like how you can find shortcuts by doing long jumps, and as others have noted the edges feel a little... I'd say inconsistent, sometimes it seems I die too soon, other times it seems I'm rolling on air. One person said it's a top vs bottom issue, that's possible.
Some commented that they like the variations in speed, but I'm with schminitz in that it just seems wrong... I'm guessing that it's because you're doing x+1 and y+1 without scaling it down or something like that? Or maybe it's intentional and just to make it more difficult, and that's fine, just seems like it might be more intuitive if the directions were scaled a bit more appropriately.
Lots of fun though!
YES!! My nostalgia meter is off the charts!
I suck horribly at this game but man if it isn't fun. The music on level 2 is pure gold and I think you nailed the mechanics perfectly.
Very nice, but I don't like that it's so hard on the restart, how about letting people getting a chance to balance it on the edge a bit more! That's part of the fun in Marble Madness, imho; "I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make it, I'm gonna.... Nooooooooooo....." :)
EDIT: My bad. Before this edit, I was stupidly explaining a perceived problem with the diagonal movement, but it turns out I just needed to play it more. The movement speeds are all correct, and it makes sense why the left/right is faster than up/downs so that moving diagonal keeps you aligned to the isometric tiles. Sorry for being dumb :)
I like the background, music, and jumping physics a lot. Great potential for shortcuts!
Bugs:
- I noticed is when you resume from pause, your ball will get the key press as well and jump every time.
- Your menus should not wrap (i.e., right now if you hold left, it cycles between both options). At the end of the first level, you are probably holding Down+Left to hit the goal. As soon as the end-of-level menu appears, the key-repeat starts moving the menu, too, so this automatically will highlight "Restart Level" instead of "Next Level". The first time I beat the level, I accidentally restarted the level because this was the first menu I saw, and I didn't know if the yellow or white option was the current selection, and since your menu wraps, it's impossible to know which is which and it's a total guess. I selected the one that was highlighted when the menu first popped up, which turned out to be "Restart Level" because of the key repeat, and it wasn't until partway through the level that I realized that it was the same level again.
Potential improvements:
- I think it would be neat if you figured out how to dynamically animate the dots in the marble. Right now it's just a sprite animation, but if you could do a psuedo-3D ring of dots that behave semi-realistically then that would be sick.
- And to echo others' sentiments, it feels like the edge is about 1 or 2 pixels closer than it appears. In reality, if a rolling ball went over the edge a little bit but was spinning away from the edge, it might be able to pull itself back up. I'd shoot for that kind of feel.
Ka-Phew ! At first I thought this was just another Marble Madness clone, Lucatron. But =NO!= You have the ability to JUMP - and in higher levels, it's REQUIRED. This makes it especially tricky !
Great 3D graphics, music, and engine ! Keep it up !
what if marble madness and super monkey ball were combined? this is the answer lol
jarsh finx
this is pretty easy. im really good at Marble Madness, so, never underestimate me.
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