A Drag on Chaos by pkenney
In a hypothetical frictionless universe, a double pendulum is a never-ending source of beautiful chaos in motion.
What a shame that in Unity's 2D physics engine, an unexplained bug causes such a system to lose energy rapidly, dragging it inevitably into a quiet ash-gray stillness. Fortunately for us, the theme makes this bug a feature!
Only you, the player, repeatedly feeding energy into the system by hand, can bring this world to life and hold off its fate.
While this entry may appear at first to be only a toy, it holds several secret challenges for you to discover and complete.
TIPS ON THE CHALLENGES (very light spoiler warning)
Each challenge will show something yellow when you are moving toward their goal. So keep your eyes out for yellow indicators and try to understand what they might be asking you to do more of.
Double-pendulums are chaos, so even once you understand what you want to do, it's still pretty tough to make the system do your bidding. One tip is that no goal will be solvable from a very low-energy state, so sometimes the best approach to solving the challenges is to load the system up with some energy first and then try to seize opportunities. Another tip is that sometimes a 1-2 punch combo can be an effective way to push the system into new modes, because just a single push gets eaten by friction pretty quickly.
Good luck!
Dev Notes
This is my 21st Ludum Dare, but this entry brings two firsts that I enjoyed:
This is the first time I have made music for a game, something I have wanted to try for a while.
This is the first time I have used procedural graphics. I used the Shapes package from Freya Holmér, which I so easy to use that I scrapped my graphics completely and used a pure-code approach to all the graphics. It also handle the text and this was the easiest "UI" I've ever made.
The last thing to mention about this entry is that it took the long way around. For a while at the start, it was a WASD platformer where you jumped on the pendulum, and had pixel-art graphics! I had absolutely no idea this Unity bug existed, but once I got dragged into it, I decided that was thematic and leaned in.
I hope you find it interesting! I'm curious how many of the secret challenges you find, and which was the hardest.
| Link | https://savagehill.itch.io/drag-on-chaos |
| Link | http://savagehillgames.com/LD50/DragOnChaos-LD50-Code.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/a-drag-on-chaos |
Ratings
| Overall | 104th | 3.813⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 235th | 3.516⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 61th | 3.984⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 465th | 3.25⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 254th | 3.578⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 35th | 4⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 462th | 1.938⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 59th | 3.871⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
Still despite that I really enjoyed this. It was a nice chill game to play after such a busy weekend. The music was top notch and matching it to the action of the pendulum made it that much better.
It took me a while to finish all 3 challenges, the big loop was the hardest but after that the **Spoilers Ahead** Bonus Momentum mode was a cool touch afterwards. I was able to get it to big loop like 6 times in a row after that.
As always I enjoy what you end up making :). great job!
I thought this has some really interesting consequences. My reaction to this game was more of my eyes just drying out from intense focus lol. There is effectively no downtime because you are constantly attacking the pendulum whether you hit or miss trying to conserve the momentum.
So even though I didn't feel *tension* itself, I was still fully engaged, if not MORE engaged due to having a pretty singular goal of gaining speed.
I actually never did get all 3 secrets, just the center one and big air. The secret goals were a really nice touch and inspires me to try something like this where I create an interesting toy first and foremost, and then give some hidden goals for people to find, rather than explicit ones. I feel like that leans into the exploration feeling you want to give to people along with a toy so that they are encouraged to creatively probe the game.
The fact that this is a physics game helps a lot with this approach. There are other hidden objective games like Achievement Unlocked. But in these sorts of games you're kinda just playing against the designer. Trying to get in their head and guessing at their secrets. For Drag on Chaos, you know that all the secrets lie behind mastering the physics, both in the pendulum and the lazy cursor.
So ultimately I think that's what I really like about this game. There are a lot of implicit rules that are built right into the core of the game and you stick to it. All those rules cascade into a system that really keeps the player engaged and wanting to master this simple looking toy. The extra feedback of the trails + increasing music definitely adds to this feeling.
Lemme grab some eyedrops..
But the idea is cool and a very unique interpretation of the theme.
Unfortunately I really had some trouble with the mouse, which caused me a lot of the hits I had aimed for. I have never really tried making a physics based game, so I am fairly ignorant about the difficulties in giving objects a proper weight, so I would assume that a more responsive mouse would have created too much of an impact on the pendulum which would have made the game much too easy, but if I had to change one thing in this game it would be the mouse speed.
The music was very fitting and I was impressed how much of it there was. Minimalist music for minimalist visuals are a great fit. It got me into a relaxed mood.
Speaking of which, the atmosphere was very smooth. The simple shapes and meditative music made this a very soothing experience.
I think the number indicators are overall a pretty good idea, as they indicate that there is a challenge very nearby to the current state. However, I find that sometimes they seem to obscure the challenge. In particular, the center indicator seems to always count down, which is confusing as from what I can tell the actual condition is having the pendulum near the center for a long enough time. Perhaps the problem is that it disappears quickly enough that it always seems like it counts down to zero? I'm not sure.
Like others, I had significant trouble with the mouse. It felt kind of laggy, and I honestly wasn't sure if the game was actually experiencing lag or if that was just the intended physics. So I definitely think snappier controls would be better with the mouse.
The dynamic music is extremely fun. It really does make me want to keep playing just to keep the music going, which is great. This gameplay is like, the definition of intrinsic motivation, and I think it really works to hook the player. The lack of a specific loss condition is also probably important for that. In any case, it is really good.
I like the graphics, and the sound design is reaaaally polished.
Good job!