Coalesce (Working Title)

An arcade-style physics puzzle game (reasoning below)

In Coalesce, you are a pinball. As a sentient ball trapped inside a pinball machine, you must use the only tool at your disposal to escape. You have the ability to Coalesce, increasing your mass, and making you impact with an unreasonable amount of force. Hit the right spot hard enough and you might just break free.

Concept Creation and Genre

While working with Unity's physics engine during tutorials, I was curious to explore a game where the mass of an object changed based on the player's input. I liked the idea enough that I decided I would pursue it further as my end of semester project. Making a game where you play as the ball in a pinball machine made sense, as the idea was compact enough to achieve a complete game in the given time frame. The idea, while simple, offers a lot of opportunity for deeper exploration.

It was a natural extension of the idea that it would become a puzzle game, as I am anticipating most of challenge of the game to come from knowing when to be heavy and when to remain light. The very rudimentary idea is that a player could control their launch angle by making themselves heavier on the paddles, and could also break certain surfaces by increasing their mass (and by extension their force on impact). The decision to make the game a puzzle game also necessitates the creation of multiple levels.

I plan on styling the game to make it resemble an arcade pinball machine. The best case scenario is that the levels are easily recognizable as a classic arcade-style pinball machine, whilst being appealing to look at. I plan on taking visual inspiration from the Synthwave aesthetic of the 1980s, introduced to me through games such as Hotline Miami and Katana Zero.

Much of the game play inspiration for this game has come from other light-weight physics based games such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Poly Bridge.

Target Audience

Coalesce is targeted at casual players who enjoy solving physics puzzles. All the puzzles in Coalesce will be designed with at least one intended solution in mind, and should introduce ideas that  increase in complexity over the course of play.  Players will be challenged in a way that encourages outside of the box thinking and rewards a deep understanding of the systems at play.

To target such an audience, the game would be most suitable as a browser game or mobile game. Consequently, the game needs to be easy to pick up and play, but the core game play loop should be enjoyable enough that it keeps players engaged. In this way, even if a player takes sometime to discover the solution to a level, they are still enjoying their time with the game. This is not a game players are expected to invest a lot of time into. Were it an actual product then it would likely be free and earn money via ad revenue.

A smaller subset of players may also appreciate the Synthwave aesthetic as a nostalgic nod to sci-fi and action films of the 1980s.

Treatment

At the core of Coalesce, is the idea of controlling the game with a single input that changes the mass of a sentient pinball in a pinball machine. Changing the mass of an object on the fly has some interesting consequences. An object of great mass moving at a specific speed will have a far greater impact on collision than an object of minimal mass move at the same speed. Normally, to get a very heavy ball to move at the same speed as a lighter ball, you would be required to give the ball a proportionally larger force. In Coalesce, the ball's mass changes after the force has been applied to it. It would be like throwing a tennis ball, but getting hit by a truck when trying to catch that same tennis ball.

Understanding this is the core of the game-play loop. The player will make the ball light so that the paddles can launch the ball at significant speed, then the player will make the ball heavy so that when the ball impacts a surface, it does so with an unreasonable amount of force. Hitting specific places on the walls of the pinball machine would allow the ball to be free, progressing the player to the next level. To adjust the ball's launch angle, the player can make the ball heavier whilst on the paddles so that they are too heavy to be launched. When the player thinks the ball is in the right spot, they can become light again and the paddle will fling them into the air.

The ball would very much like to escape the pinball machine they have been trapped in, but only being able to control their own mass means options are limited. This is reminiscent of the mobile game Cut the Rope, where the only action the player can take (at least in the early levels) is to cut ropes in such a way that the candy attached will reach Om Nom (Figure 1). 

To increase the number of puzzles that are possible, Cut the Rope introduces additional items into the scene that player can interact with over the course of many levels. In a similar manner, Coalesce may need to introduce new ideas to keep the puzzles from becoming stale. If this is the case, some ideas that could be introduced are:

• Switches that open a door if the ball passes over them.
• Areas of changed gravity.
• Surfaces that apply a force to the ball.
• Areas that disable the use of Coalesce.

The style I will be aiming for is called Synthwave, and is a call back to 1980s sci-fi and action films. Figure 2 depicts an animated example of Synthwave with the silhouettes of two palm trees outlined by a stylized sun. Bright neon colors are a staple of this style, which will be used to help sell the idea of the game taking place in an arcade.

Synthwave also tends to feature mesh-like planes stretching to a distant horizon where the aforementioned stylized sun is setting. An example of this can be seen in Figure 3. A distant horizon seems appropriate to include in a game about breaking out of the small confines of a pinball machine.

Figure 4 depicts a pinball machine that somewhat resembles the style I am targeting. It has the neon colors that I plan on including, and contains some of the other characteristic elements of Synthwave. I envision that the Coalesce will feature many more elements than the pinball machine in Figure 4 does, such as the play area being back dropped by something similar to the image depicted in Figure 3.

Needless to say, if the game includes a soundtrack, it will features music in the Synthwave genre. That being said, the areas of focus for this game will likely be the visual effects and custom assets.