BackWarp

Download and Play Now

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.