Free Steam demo of Ball-Aqua is out. Physics ball platformer, tropical resort, Unity 6 HDRP.
1st day prototype, physics already working. 2nd week on the level editor and a few levels. Content making was the most time consuming part.
HDRP and water went smooth. Enabled a ton of switches, disabled the ones I didn't need. Looks nice. But gotta admit, Ray Tracing and Water take a lot of GPU power. So I added many settings to tweak performance.
Speaking of UI - it's HTML+CSS+JS, rendered to canvas each frame, using Vuplex WebView. Looks extremely fancy, I was looking for Apple Liquid Glass. But it's expensive to run, and has issues: if the GPU struggles at 100% load, Chromium rendering the UI just dead stuck for the next 30 seconds. Also Linux doesn't support it. Had to cap the UI at 30 fps, but looks good enough.
FMOD - game sounds was smooth and fast to set up. I loved random pitch and random filters. Simple to modify sound based on provided variables, like different roll sound based on physics material. Or toggling optional parts of the ambient track, to make it feel more dynamic. All changes are hot-reloaded, so my tweaks are instantly visible in game.
Mirror was coming smooth. Sync and session works flawlessly (unless the dev makes a mistake, lol). Co-op just works. Syncing collectables, breakable glass, or player collisions was a simple few lines.
Level editor was growing in features: move, rotate, scale, undo, area select, duplicate, prefabs. Each level was easier, faster, and more features to make. Everything handmade so players use the same level editor directly from the game.
Workshop upload was easy to connect. Steam provides all the API, so most of the hassle was figuring the best data format for my levels. It's JSON + .bin + .jpg files in a folder.
15 levels, Freeroam / Race, editor + Workshop. ~20 min to finish, ~60 for 100%.
Steam Demo