With a flourescent lighting art style reminiscent of the 80s and a matching soundtrack to boot, Revolver is a game in which the player revolves rapidly around a rotating world. Everytime the player makes one revolve, they'll get faster. Once the player has reached a high enough speed, objects will start to appear to slow them down. If the player goes too slow for the revolving world they'll fall off and its game over.
When starting this project, I had one aim: to keep the gameplay, the input and the aesthetics as simple as possible. If I couldn't outline every major feature and aspect in the game, upon a single page; then the game was too complicated. The reason for this is because I've a great admiration for games that manage to convey a subtle yet complex mechanic through minimal input. And through an iterative process, I like the multiple ways in which a game's limitations can be its greatest strength, and we see this a lot in mobile games. Having said that, I'm not much of a Mobile gamer, but the games that don't rely on on-screen buttons are, I believe, much more at home within the mobile space and personally, something I'm more likely to play. After speaking with developers Laser Dog; I realized that their single input platformer HoPiKo was a very elegant solution to platforming action on mobile. I used this as the basis for a challenge to myself.
In Revolver, the player takes the form of a ball; as they roll very quickly around the surface of a sphere. From the image, you can see the curvature of the sphere giving you a rough estimate of how small it is. It takes mere seconds to get round even at its slowest speed. Each time the player laps the sphere, their speed will increase. At the sides, its certainly easier to lap quickly, but you also risk rebounding violently if you get too close. After a set number of laps, obstacles will start to appear on the sphere gradually, these are aimed to slow you down. But of Course, if you hit too many of them, the ball will begin to slow down and you'll lose control in the process.
I never implemented a fail state, just a speedometer which would relay your speed. If I were to revisit it, I would make it so as the speed increases, a new layer will be added to the music track, and also be removed, should they start to slow down.
As before, I wanted to make a game that made use of the limited control input with smart phones. So the player controls the game by placing their finger on the screen. The player can then steer, left and right by moving their finger left or right. Should the player release their finger from the screen, they will jump (this allows the player to leap obstacles), but does have a cool down of 1 lap, so the player cannot spam the jump. I did however only ever implement it with a mouse.
I made this back in 2015, and in truth - its a little ropey. I never worked out how to change the gravity, and so you can clearly tell that the ball just pivots off the spinning sphere and as far as music, vfx or even menus - theres nothing. Having said that, it was still surpisingly good fun. At some point I'd like to revisit the idea, start over completely and make it with fresh eyes and knowledge.
