Marble Marcher is equal elements mesmerising, fascinating, irritating and academic – a brief, free ball-rolling game by CodeParade, you’ve acquired a ticking timer, a objective, and a procedural fractal panorama to by some means navigate throughout, typically shifting and warping beneath you. It’s a little bit of a technical marvel regardless of its mechanical simplicity. Below is a quick have a look at the game, plus an evidence on the collision detection trick that made the game attainable within the first place. Grab the game on Itch here – do word you’ll want a beefy GPU to run at increased resolutions.
The GPU-heavy nature of Marble Marcher is due to the rendering method it makes use of. Ray marching is a seldom-used strategy, nevertheless it permits for the rendering of massively complicated fractal areas in realtime, although its price on GPU scales straight with decision. 1280 x 720 is about all that my laptop computer Geforce 1070 can do properly. While visually beautiful, fractal shapes don’t usually make for probably the most playable game-spaces, however by a really correct collision detection system (partially primarily based on the renderer itself), CodeParade discovered {that a} easy ball-rolling format labored properly.
Even if the underlying math and methods make your mind sizzle like bacon, it’s mesmerising to take a look at. Marble Marcher contains a couple of half hour’s price of ranges to roll by, a few of them morphing in real-time. There’s additionally a display screen saver mode so you possibly can ogle the environments that may be generated from iterating on a single, easy supply mannequin. Being a pleasant type, CodeParade has additionally launched the supply code for Marble Marcher here on Github. I’d like to see extra executed with this – different game sorts explored, maybe, or simply extra ranges, if nothing else.
Marble Marcher is free and here on Itch, though half the attraction (for my part, at the very least) is watching and making an attempt to wrap your mind round CodeParade’s video on ray marching, and the video above for a way the physics have been resolved.
