User Guide

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.

Controls

• Space - Coalesce, becoming heavier, stopping the paddles from launching you and increasing your impact force.

That's it! There's only one button.

In-depth Guide

Coalesce is designed to be played without this guide, but if you get stuck this chapter can help clarify.

When you first start the game you will be greeted by the title screen and a selection of levels.

Once you have selected a level you will be prompted to press space to make yourself heavier. Take a moment to note how becoming heavier stops the paddles from launching you and the slingshots (the triangles) from knocking you. Becoming heaver also gives you more force when you hit the bumpers, potentially destroying them on impact.

Once you have destroyed all the bumpers in a level by hitting them while moving at speed and holding space, the level will prompt you to fall past the paddles by holding space. The level is complete and will pause, giving you a moment to take note of your time. The bottom left button will replay the current level and the bottom right will return to menu.

In later levels you will encounter bumpers that cannot be destroyed all the time. These bumpers can be toggled on and off by switches of the same color around the level. They must be destroyed just as the regular bumpers before you can complete the level.

Documentation

The five additional areas I chose to focus on for Coalesce were:

• UI art,
• restart game button,
• effects & particle art,
• and multiple levels (which counts as two).

Concept Differences

The core idea for Coalesce has remained the same throughout development. The game still remains a physics puzzler with a synthwave aesthetic, but may of the specifics have changed.

Perhaps most notably, the game moved away from the stricter puzzle like game described in the game concept towards towards a much more free-from style of play. In the final game there are many ways to approach the same level, rather than just a few intended solutions as was the intention earlier during development. This change was necessary due to the innate randomness of a pinball machine preventing the creation of levels with finite solutions that felt fair. In older versions of the game, even if the player understood exactly what they had to do to complete a level, they may spend minutes trying to get the ball to behave as they needed it to.

This change in play necessitated other changes too, like implementing a timer to encourage players to look for faster solutions to levels. Rather than punishing players for getting it wrong in a game as unpredictable as Coalesce, the timer rewards players who get it right.

These changes also meant that early ideas such as adding switches that would toggle doors were scrapped in favor of toggling bumpers directly. This allowed the game to retain some level of strategy but without inhibiting the player in frustrating ways.

Testing Summary

During testing of earlier builds, some of the most prevalent feedback was that the controls and aim needed some clarification.

It probably would be a good idea to have the controls somewhere on the first level and maybe even the aim too in some way.

This is likely due to the game presenting itself as a pinball machine, so players automatically make the assumption they must control the paddles in some way. To help clarify this, I added a prompt for the player to press space at the start of each level. I also added arrows that point downwards past the paddles when all the bumpers have been destroyed in a level to help clarify the aim.

I want more levels! ...and maybe a boss.

This was a sentiment echoed by several play testers late in the game's development. While a boss would have been too much work in the remaining time, additional levels were plausible and a good opportunity to resolve some difficulty spikes between levels.

Ball got stuck on one of the triangle bumpers one time

A few times during play the ball would get stuck somewhere. This was simply due to the surface the ball landed on being too close to flat, so all colliders in the game where this happened were made steeper, even if that meant they did not match their sprite's shape.

Asset List

All the sprites in the game were created in procreate by myself.

All the scripts were either written by myself  or taken from the tutorials.

The font I used for Coalesce was Vermin Vibes by Andrew McCluskey and can be found at <https://www.dafont.com/vermin-vibes.font>. It is free for non-commercial use.