OverLight - "Tetris", but with lasers (FrooxArchive #5)

Hello everyone and welcome to another FrooxArchive entry!

This time I bring you the last of my “trio” of mobile games I published between 2012 and 2013, before I got into VR and one that started it all - OverLight. Not only that, but this game is my very first Unity project.

Unlike CardMatch 3D and DeCalc, this title is a bit less unfinished than these two - it never quite made it out of alpha stage. However it still has 10 unique levels and time attack mode for you to play!

Originally named “LaserTris” this game was my attempt at realizing one of the gameplay ideas that used to float around my head for a while - a twist on Tetris mechanics. In the game the level is filled with glass tetromino blocks, which redirect laser beams like prisms.

Your goal is to break those blocks so that two lasers coming from the opposing sides intersect, overheat the blocks and blow them up. For each block that you break you lose some points too, so you have to choose deliberately.

The game has a number of arcade elements, like being able to combo and adding more gameplay elements as you progress - stars trapped in the blocks that you must catch as they break, unbreakable blocks or explosive ones. I had a lot of plans to expand and enrich the mechanics, but unfortunately I moved on to other projects before I got to explore these.

One notable example is a Puzzle mode, where you have to clear out a premade level with the least amount of hits possible. This would include a level editor as well, to make it easy to build these levels.

OverLight was my first Unity project, so a number of challenges when developing it were tied to learning the engine as well - building the game primarily for mobile platforms (Android & iOS) made it doubly so. I quickly learned that things like pooling objects and limiting overdraw (e.g. reducing how many layered transparent/additive effects are on-screen) make a big impact on performance.

I even bought a small iPod Touch back then, so I could test the game on iOS to release in the App Store. The version I got was particularly challenging, because it was the first version with the retina display, but same GPU as previous generation, so its fill rate (how many pixels can be rasterized per second) was woefully inadequate, making the overdraw problem way worse - due to large number of overlaid effects, OverLight would exhaust it quickly.

Curiously the game was developed around the time when Unity had an Flash export feature, which I ended up toying with and running into a number of challenges. The engine would translate the code into ActionScript, which ran into some trouble - I remember that it was unable to deal with switch statements within a switch statement, requiring me to change a code around a bit. It was far from the only issue though and Unity has quickly decided to axe this export option.

Another challenge I ran into with this style that I haven’t quite solved before dropping the project were visuals. Most of the effects are based on light and my goal was to make the game look bright, colorful and vivid. But layering a lot of these effects quickly leads to making things incomprehensible and visually busy. For things to look bright and vivid, you also have to have darkness, so it has something to stand against.

When developing this title, I opted for a more open approach - releasing early alpha builds frequently, writing about them, to generate some buzz. This worked a little bit, but the game never quite got enough of a community to warrant it and after a while I realized I was probably spending more time preparing posts and videos (and updating the trailer) about the game and less actually developing it.

Full development playlist (including development videos, different versions of trailer and my cat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTF84_N2mdg&list=PLoAvz0_U4_3y5RtJf8m5NHtT5T87xvST3

This made me approach the subsequent two mobile games (DeCalc and CardMatch 3D) differently and focus on getting into a workable polished version first, with a more clearer scope for it, before releasing to the public. This still allowed for the option of expansion on that basis if I wanted to, but also made me feel better about moving on from these projects if I wanted to work on other things. In contrast, OverLight always felt like a half finished job that I abandoned.

There was another interesting lesson I learned as well - my goal was to promote the game's (hopefully) novel gameplay mechanics and stress that even though it has tetromino blocks, it's not really Tetris, because it plays very different. However I noticed that people tend to understand things in terms of things they already know, so explaining the game as "Tetris, but with lasers" ended up being much simpler and catchier, even not quite accurate.

All in all, despite lots of challenges and mistakes with this project, I’m happy for it, because I also learned a lot with it. It was my first jump into a new game engine, mobile/multiplatform games and publishing about my work on various platforms - the Windows/Mac/Linux version I published through Desura, which was sort of a Steam competitor, but more for indie titles.

This was back when Steam still wasn’t very accessible to indie titles and required to garner a large number of community votes to get Greenlit. Back then, it felt a bit like a catch 22 - I really wanted to publish on Steam for good accessibility to help build community, but publishing on Steam already required a big community to be built in the first place.

Regardless, I’ve taken the latest version of the project, cleaned up a few things and made builds with the latest version of Unity 4, so you can try this title out on your PC or Android phone. I hope you enjoy this look into history. Let me know if you have any questions, comments. And I’ll see you with the next one!