The design changes showcased in the video are definitely a welcome improvement. As someone who owns both a Steam Deck and an OLED Switch, I find the Switch to be a bit too small for my hands, while the Steam Deck feels slightly large and bulky. Could the Switch 2 strike the perfect balance between the two?
We’re very grateful for the opportunity to create this experience! Huge thanks to you and the Netlify team for supporting innovative campaigns like this one.
Physics collision bugs are more likely to occur during frame rate drops. We’ve tried to address this by implementing an auto-respawn mechanism to handle cases where the ball gets stuck inside a collider, but it seems this sometimes fails. Anyway, thank you for playing!
The issue with using the gyroscope is that the Device Orientation API requires websites to request user permission first (at least on iOS Safari), which we feared might drive away too many visitors.
Thanks. The WebGL rendering is based on Three.js. We're using Rapier for the physics simulation, and Howler for the audio.
Our game engine is responsible for all the controls and updating things like the camera position (which follows the position of the ball at every frame).
Thank you for the kind words. We’re glad you enjoy our work!
We’d love to create a longer game someday, but making a living as a small indie studio in the gaming world is definitely challenging. Never say never, though!
Besides people from the Netlify team who helped write the content and worked on some back-end aspects, the design and development of the game took around 8 weeks for a team of two.
Actually, we used a recording of a basketball for the sound of the marble bouncing. It wasn’t our original intention, as we initially imagined the ball to have more of a metallic quality. However, the rubbery effect kinda works, I guess. :)
We tried to implement a workaround for that [1], but for some reason it still shows up from time to time. I really wish iOS Safari gave developers a way to disable these gestures!
Thank you. The physics engine we're using (Rapier) really does most of the work to make the spin of the marble look realistic. But we spent quite some time tweaking the controls to make them as enjoyable as we could.
That's weird, the desktop controls are supposed to work regardless of your keyboard layout. Are you able to play with your arrow keys (which are also supported)?
Thanks! Agreed that the mobile experience can sometimes be a little difficult compared to the desktop version. It was hard to get right, and we may have set the ball speed a bit too high.
Thanks for playing. Actually, your time is displayed once you finish the experience (there are 5 levels in total).
During the project, we discussed adding a speed-run mode but ultimately had to drop this feature due to time constraints. However, we intentionally included some shortcuts in the level design with that intent in mind.