Porygon asked (on the Steam community hub):
Am I the only one who has the movement physics feel… off sometimes?
I don’t remember the first game feeling like this, but maybe that’s my memory being bad. I feel like the marble’s movement and inertia is inconsistent and “muddy”, especially in outdoor areas for some reason. It feels a bit like playing on a “slippery” surface like ice that sometimes also clings like mud – hard to describe.
The physics is definitely totally different here, and that’s on purpose. Here is a post about why!
Porygon continues:
I think that broadly speaking the marble has too much inertia and not enough player control. I frequently find myself bonking into obstacles, getting thrown into pits, crawling ponderously up simple slopes, et cetera. Probably I am getting bad at video games, lol. As a kid I used to play Marble Blast a lot and it’s possible that my reflexes/sense of timing isn’t as good anymore. It has been a long time since I played the first game all the way through, despite how often I listen to the soundtrack lol.
If the physics were more generous – more base speed without boosting, tighter turning, faster deceleration – I think it would make for a smoother and more fun experience. I had the funny thought that I’d like to try this game with a racing wheel controller rig, because that’s how much “weight” the marble seems to have to me.
In the original game, we were on UDK, which was the free version of Unreal Engine 3 that didn’t give you source code access, and one of the most unfortunate things about that was there was a very low default cap on angular velocity that we couldn’t change, which meant the ball could not roll fast enough for that to be how the movement worked. Instead, we let it roll as best it can, but most of your movement was applied as linear forces, so the ball just kind of skimmed along the ground most of the time. I never liked this!
What you’re describing actually sounds more like that original movement to me, so maybe I just didn’t get as close as I wanted to proper ball physics. In Redux, the ball can spin super fast, so torque really is most of how you move (hooray, physically correct ball). Making this actually feel good (which I think it does, but it’s super subjective) is an interesting balance of things like friction, restitution (bounciness), linear and angular damping, and modulating those things contextually.
I also do a number of extra non-physically-correct things. I reduce your upwards momentum if it’s going to make you slam into a ceiling, so if you boost up a ramp indoors really fast you tend to lose a lot of speed quickly and have a prolonged “apex” of your jump. When boosting fast enough, and barely above a floor surface that’s sloping down in front of you, I apply a linear downwards force to try for a (to me) satisying sonic-style “hugging the ground” effect when you’re rolling super fast over gentle little hills. This also means there are times when you might expect to catch some air and you don’t; I prefer it but you might not.
Also, when you hit something while boosting (which might be the ground or a wall or a quarterpipe), I stomp the default “bounce off” behaviour and aggressively replace the ball’s movement direction to keep you oriented to the new surface normal (provided the difference isn’t massive), which helps keep you aligned to ramps and also keeps you moving more in the direction you boosted when you slam into a wall. If too much of this happens, it stops feeling like a physics simulation, so there’s a chance you’re seeing some edge cases to it. Here’s a video of how that works:
Overall though, what you don’t like does sound like something I did on purpose – any time I had it feeling too arcadey I tended to veer back to a heavier ball with less direct control. I feel like this matches the game’s slow/relaxed vibe more, but I also think that sort of depends how much of a relaxed vibe you are able to enforce in yourself as a player; for some people it’s just always going to be frustrating having to account for your angular momentum so much without a strong torque input.
The other thing is, people talk about InFlux in the context of games like Marble Blast and Monkey Ball and Kula World and Venineth and stuff, but I’ve actually never played any of them. I never played a single marble game. So with this, I was probably going for something totally different but inadvertently signaling that this was a spiritual successor to those things. A weird problem to have.
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