How i changed an idea that stuck for 4 years


Project Collider

I first got inspired to create a hypercasual game four years ago when I visited the exhibition "All Possible Paths", featuring the life and works of Richard Feynman.

Light takes all possible paths from point A to point B.

I was also heavily intrigued by the inner workings of the Large Hadron Collider,
also known as a particle accelerator.

The idea of getting a particle to go as fast as possible with the intention of colliding it sparked a hypercasual game idea in me.

The eventual death of an endless runner game can be a success, not a failure.

The purpose of accelerating a particle is to, eventually, collide and destroy it.

The original mechanics was to move a particle left and right to avoid enemy particles coming from the front and back and accelerate when you are on top of a resonator.

games relying on colliders and collision seemed wildly appropriate, which is why I had the working title of Project Collider

Project Entropy

However, while developing my game, I realised that I wanted and needed a One-button game. (Thanks to a glitch with the new input system in unity)

I had to reinvent my design for this game, and another inspiration came, which was the film, Tenet. This film also happened to dabble in pseudoscience; The idea that time could flow in either direction was fascinating.

This idea led me to have a particle that can go forwards and backwards at will but cannot stop. I renamed my project Entropy.

the enemies now came from the sides and not the front

And I went for the outer space theme because I needed enemy particles to come from the side, which does not happen in an experimental particle accelerator.

Backwarp
after some playtesting, I realised that I needed a name that would tell the player how to play the game despite the deliberate lack of instructions. Thus I came up with backwarp, which did help justify my outer space theme.

What went right.
I did numerous playtests with my colleagues and friends, some of whom were from esports. I managed to get the player and enemy speeds just right. Thankfully I did not have to manipulate the timescale at all.

I was also able to use my shaders knowledge, using GPU programming to blend backgrounds in real-time and move it according to world space to give the illusion of a moving environment.

I also had time to build the particle effects and postprocessing to give the top tier visual polish.

What went wrong
I did not consider that something would go wrong with displaying on different screen size as I assumed that Unity would adjust it automatically.
I had to re-do the functional space and orthographic camera and re-calibrate the physics variables.
Thankfully, this did not make much noticeable difference in the gameplay experience.

Files

Backwarp Android Build.apk 30 MB
Feb 22, 2021
Backwarp PC Build.zip 47 MB
Feb 22, 2021
Backwarp iOS Build.zip 315 MB
Feb 22, 2021

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