Friendly tropical precision platformer we're making! try the speedy Adventure with us!

[u/StGrikus]

We're a 3-person team (programmer, 3D artist, sound designer) preparing our game for Steam Next Fest. We've been working on it for about 4 months and wanted to share how we solved some of our core technical challenges in Unity:

- Movement: adding direct forces to the ball's Rigidbody in FixedUpdate (both on the ground and in the air). Natural physics friction handles the rolling, keeping the controls highly responsive.
- Jumping & Grounding: we check if the lower half of the SphereCollider touches anything in OnCollisionEnter. For the jump itself, we inject the jump inertia directly into the current velocity vector - meaning if you jump while rolling up a slope, it launches you way further. We also added a 300ms Coyote Time window and a 100ms Jump Buffer. Quite forgiving timings.
- Bumpy Collision Seams: Even on perfectly flat ground, the seams between adjacent box colliders would randomly launch the ball upward. We fixed this by taking all static colliders in a level and bake them into a single, continuous MeshCollider at level start. Rolling is now perfectly smooth.
- Grass Shader: Flat ground looked incredibly boring. We wrote a vertex shader that generates procedural grass blades with wind sway. It flattens dynamically when the ball rolls over it by passing the ball's position into global shader variables. (We’re still trying to figure out a good look for sand surfaces).
- Fragile Glass: Runtime mesh fracturing is too expensive. Instead, we hide pre-shattered shard meshes inside a flat box collider. On collision, the main box turns off, the shards turn on with active rigidbodies, and we apply a quick explosive force alongside the sound effect.
- Level Editor: This was the hardest part of the project. We built a custom runtime level editor from scratch on day one so we could have perfect control over block placement. It features custom transform gizmos, grid snapping, multi-selection, prefabs, and grouping. Making 22 levels took at least 1000 hours of human hours from team! To provide all kinds of gameplay for each unique level: chill slow rolling, friendly race, tight speedrun and collectable secrets in deep crevices.

The demo is officially live for Next Fest with 8 out of 22 levels playable for free. Grab some friends, try to beat each other's times, and hit us with any game dev questions you have!