[iOS] MΔRBLΘID – (Marble Madness x Alto's Adventure)

Hey there fellow devs,

after two and a half years we finally released Marbloid! Marbloid is a 3D tilt&tap marble runner for iPhone and iPad.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marbloid/id1207773612

The game is an endlessrunner with proceudrally generated worlds that created quite a lot of challenges. We pooled a lot of the stuff, so we can provide 60fps smooth gameplay.

Release Trailer:

Cheers
Johannes

Edit: Updated information

 

No thoughts so far? Alrighty, then I guess I'll just show off the new gameplay trailer:

Since I haven't seen statistics for finished iOS games concerning performance, here is a bit of data from marbloid (running in the editor):




Most notably: We have a f❤❤kload of gameobjects and unity handles them really well. I didn't think that unity has so little problems with that many (most of the time disabled) game objects.

 

Hey Johannes,

I thought the trailer looked great! I have little experience with unity, but I am an avid mobile-gamer, and I loved it. One thing though, I thought the constant cuts and over editing became a little annoying. I would've just liked to see the regular gameplay, as the game looks really unique and fun to play. Of course, a little editing is fine, but the whole "craziness" vibe didn't really entice me.

As a whole, awesome job!

 

Hey Aravmisra,

Thanks a lot for the honest feedback! Yep the trailer is quite over the top. My colleague has a motion designer background and therefore is excellent in creating well cut trailers. I do agree, that this won't show the gameplay as well, but I think as for getting attention it is the better way to go.

We want to do a longplay (like 20 minutes or so), in which we show the uncut gameplay and the awesome adaptive music. The App Store trailer also is not as fast paced as the reveal trailer.

 

Here is a look behind the scene of how we texture most of our materials. We do that, by using

Triplanar projection (Blending texture projection by the normal of the mesh)



Box Mapping (Triplanar, but without blending)



Flat projection (One texture projected from one direction)



We also use a custom shader editor to easily control the size and rotation of those projections:

The big advantage here, is that we don't need to use uvs for our level segments and that there will never be seams between segments, since the texture space is bound to the world rather than the object.

 

We hit the App Store last thursday and got immediately featured in 26 countries!


For all tech lovers, here is a small glimpse behind the curtain of our level generation machine:
https://twitter.com/Supyrb/status/1069976867397099520

Excited times, I'm tellin ya!

 

A bit more tech shizzle for you: We're using a custom billboard shader that rotates quads to the camera and moves them up and down with a absolute sine wave and a time offest which is stored in the mesh vertex color:

Statistics so far:
- over 100 days of total play time (no menus or clicking, real game time)
- Average rating of 4.8 Stars
- The App Store feature resulted in 37 million impressions and 760.000 page views

Leave a review if you enjoy the game!

 

This game came out beautiful! I remember seeing you post your triplanar scaling shader example and some noobies saying it was useless Xd. I disagree about the trailer, I think most people will get it pretty quick and appreciate the style.

Doing a time offset based on vertex color but using a gradient could be interesting.

 

@JayMounes Thanks a lot! Yeah, it's not always easy to get people to understand the use cases of abstract shader concepts

Hm, that sounds like an interesting idea, this would probably result in wave like jumping. For our game you will only see junks of maybe 6 emojis, so there won't be that much of an effect there. We're also pooling them and taking a random emoji out of the pool each time we need one, so I guess for ourr game it is not really interesting, but good point!