Hadron the Uniter by Erunaamo

[raw]
made by Erunaamo for LD26 (JAM)
Finished with 3 minutes on the Jam clock...it fully implements my design, but I didn't have time to tune the playability much at all. So you might find it frustrating or impossibly difficult, I don't know. It's possible to discover Hydrogen and almost certainly Helium.* I'd be interested to hear if anyone gets much farther than that.

(* UPDATE 3: Since first writing that, I've discovered Helium, and Lithium too. I think I might be able to get Beryllium but it's HARD. Can you get it before I do? Post a screenshot of the scoreboard. It's 4 protons, 4 electrons, 5 neutrons.)

Comments of any kind are welcome, of course, especially bug reports, constructive criticism, and lavish praise.

This weekend has been a huge amount of fun! I'm happy with the game I made and I plan to keep tinkering with it post-Jam, tuning the physics for playability.

UPDATE 1:
D'oh! There's something wonky going on in the preloading. Sometimes it loads, sometimes it hangs when the opening-screen diagrams have appeared but not the paragraph of instructions. Don't know why and I'm out of time, so please give it plenty of time to load, or a few tries, or something, and let me know if it works or doesn't work for you.

UPDATE 2: Fixed! I can't believe it took me a whole extra day to get the preloader working, but my game should finally be playable. So please check it out!

UPDATE 4: Jumping cursor bug fixed.

UPDATE 5: Source files posted for your amusement.

Ratings

Coolness 49% 1236
Overall(Jam) 3.18 255
Audio(Jam) 2.52 356
Fun(Jam) 2.81 307
Graphics(Jam) 3.63 174
Innovation(Jam) 3.94 29
Mood(Jam) 2.85 294
Theme(Jam) 4.03 47

Feedback

sirdorius
30. Apr 2013 路 17:24 UTC
It's a nice idea, but since I have very limited knowledge of physics I would like to get more feedback from the game on what's going on.
馃帳 Erunaamo
01. May 2013 路 00:46 UTC
Yeah...that's the minimalism!
jpverkamp
01. May 2013 路 01:38 UTC
My cursor kept jumping back to the center of the screen, which made holding onto things difficult. Still, it's a fun idea and a pretty good execution. I can't even imagine holding together enough to get some of the heavier elements.
iximeow
01. May 2013 路 02:01 UTC
Very neat! Being able to reference a periodic table ingame would probably be really helpful, as aside from Hydrogen and Helium, I don't remember exactly how many protons/neutrons there are for the elements!

I also noticed the detector seems to get really finnicky and jumpy sometimes, if that's intended you might want to explain how that works.
馃帳 Erunaamo
01. May 2013 路 02:10 UTC
Yeah, it seems jumpy to me too. Two things to watch out for in that regard:
1. If the mouse cursor gets too near the edge - as in, you're maybe leaving the game to play itself for a while - the cursor jumps back to the center by design (if a bit too fast). So stay away from the edges....
2. If you play with the flash filling your browser window, you might change the rectangle shape, and the mouse code doesn't adapt, so the "leaving" area (see #1) might get extra big. I recommend you reshape your window to the aspect ratio of the screenshot for best results.

But I wonder if there's a #3 I don't know about, because it just recently started seeming perhaps extra jumpy. Sorry.
cadin
01. May 2013 路 02:25 UTC
This is a really cool concept. I find it incredibly difficult to get anything besides Hydrogen though. The jumpy control has something to do with that.

I also think it would be helpful to have some kind of a HUD to guide you. Like showing what particles are required to build the next element, or if you have a few particles contained show what you need to grab to make something. I had a hard time remembering which particles were which, and don't really know the periodic table well enough to get much beyond Helium.

This has the potential to be a really cool educational game though of you can work out some of those issues.
馃帳 Erunaamo
01. May 2013 路 03:59 UTC
Thanks!

I really thing there's a bug in the controls now, that wasn't there before the whole fiasco with the preloader. (A bunch of event listeners got mangled in the process...I'm writing up a postmortem.) It really is jumping around for some odd reason. I think I'm going to have to fix that.

As for the hint-HUD...I agree, but I can't add features to this version, since the deadline has passed. I'll definitely continue to work on this game, though, and some such feature is very likely long-term.
馃帳 Erunaamo
01. May 2013 路 05:04 UTC
Sure enough, there was a weird mistake - must have been a copy-paste typo, I guess - making the cursor jump around. It's fixed now.
Dmitrix
01. May 2013 路 06:08 UTC
WOO! PHYSICS!
dx0ne
01. May 2013 路 11:00 UTC
Great idea - 100% theme essence.
As said before it could use some "career mode" like: gather 2 of these and 3 of these to create Theseium.
plash
01. May 2013 路 22:05 UTC
Notes:

- Definitely fits the theme.
- I am not very charmed by this, though.
- Ah, fullscreen. That's a bit better.
- Appreciating the particles lines.
- This sound gets annoying when there are many particles in my hexagon.
- It is hard to build elements.
- The rotation is a nice touch.

Things I would change:

- The sound. What to do with it would probably be more obvious if there was some music.
- Make it fun.
yellowlemming
08. May 2013 路 19:16 UTC
looks like it is a fairly nice game but I don't really know what's going on
PaulSB
13. May 2013 路 12:29 UTC
Nice idea! I always liked particle physics. I also found it incredibly difficult to make anything other than hydrogen, but I like the minimalistic look of it.
kibertoad
19. May 2013 路 22:15 UTC
with a bit more polish this could be in public schools everywhere. sir, you have my respect.
pjchardt
20. May 2013 路 01:28 UTC
Really nice concept and graphics. Very difficult for me to make anything other than Hydrogen. This is a great start to something educational if you developed it further in that direction.
Zim the Fox
20. May 2013 路 01:54 UTC
I learnt today that negatron is also a word for anti-proton. Cool! However, the name of the game bothers me. Hadrons are composite particles made of quarks. The proton and the neutron are hadrons. Hadrons simply don't 'gently hold' other particles.

How come a proton, neutron and electron don't count as hydrogen? No time to support isotopes? :3 What would make this game for me is anti-elements. Like a positron and anti-proton make anti-hydrogen.

Finally, this game is supremely hard... I only did managed H and He. I really liked it though. Great job!

Also, I had no audio while playing. I'm running on Maxthon in Win7 64Bit
Zim the Fox
20. May 2013 路 02:59 UTC
Oh, oh. Sorry for the double post, but you should add neutrinos coming out of reactions as described by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proton_proton_cycle.svg

and other fusion chains.
馃帳 Erunaamo
20. May 2013 路 12:47 UTC
Thanks for all the great comments....

Zim: Yeah, I really want anti-elements too! That was part of the original concept, and is very likely to show up in a future version. And maybe isotopes too, though that might overcomplicate things...there are certainly some simplifications at play here.

And yeah, the title doesn't really make sense. (I'm not thrilled with it myself...the phrase "Hadron the Barbarian" got stuck in my brain early in the LD weekend, and wouldn't leave.)

Plash: I appreciate the detailed feedback. "Make it fun" is definitely on the roadmap for this project! :)
Paul Sinnett
20. May 2013 路 16:39 UTC
This is a great idea. I love the concept of discovering larger and larger elements as progression.
GeorgeBroussard
20. May 2013 路 19:44 UTC
Liked the style and visuals a lot. Collided a few things but wasn't really sure what I was doing. Made hydrogen and that's about it.