Marble World News

Hey everyone!

Short update here on the Early Access release.
It went pretty good so far! (it's been 5 hours since the button was pushed)

Some bugs and issues became clear immediately which didn't show up during testing but luckily they were reported fast & tracked down to what caused them. The most critical ones of these will be resolved in the first patch (0.1.1).

Others have shown that a tutorial is very much needed to explain the controls & some aspects need some Quality of Life improvements. These things will also be prioritized to be included in the 0.1.1 patch. This patch will hit somewhere next week.

As a single developer things can take some time, and things are easily missed too. Thank you for all of your feedback! (in whatever form it got to me) If no one told me things we're bad (or good!) I wouldn't know it.

I want Marble World to be a good game, and by you providing feedback we'll get there! Patch 0.1.1 will be another step in that direction.

Don't forget to join on Discord for the most up-to-date news! https://discord.gg/jbx92tbMSG
You're free to ask any questions you have, suggestions to mention or report any bugs you may find or just have a chat. I check the steam community section too from time to time, so if that's more your thing that's fine too :)

Have a good weekend!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hey everyone!

So the past few weeks since the last post have been quite overwhelming! Keys have been distributed for marketing and some really big youtubers have created videos on it, skyrocketing the game's presence! The Discord has been growing since, and I've seen a lot of cool ideas presented already :). (some of which will be available at Early Access release)

So a big thank you to ScrapMan, Camodo Gaming, Drae and Raptor for showcasing the game and thus helping the game reach a good audience! I never expected any big youtubers to cover the game, but i'm truly honored it happened :)

[h2]What's in it?[/h2]
I'll try to keep it short. There's 2 variances of tracks, one made of wood and the other being plastic tubes. Both are seen a lot in real life video's where they are used to make actual marble runs. There's a total of 24 different pieces to use. These 2 variants are paintable in 14 different colors where 2 of them are animated.

There are at least 2 marble spawners available, one for just spawning marbles randomly with skins / effects and one more suitable for races with a gate that can open / close and settings to spawn the marbles you want. This also comes with the ability to add marble names which are used when spawning.

There are 80 decorational types as of typing, some have physics and can spin, some are boosters and some are bounce pads! All of these (except the boosters) have collisions too, so if you want you can create a track existing purely out of decorational items without any tracks. The majority of decorational items cannot be painted (for technical reasons). And the boosters can be configured in strength. (meaning you can make marble cannons)

Marbles can be customized with a name, one of 14 different skins, and an effect of which there are 16 at this moment.

The current maximum amount of marbles that you can spawn is 25k. This does not mean your PC can handle 25k, but the limit is there for the ones who have extremely powerful PC's. The default limit is 5K, which is roughly what a medium end PC can run at 60fps whilst the time is slowed down.

I feel this is a good amount of things to start the Early Access launch with, there's enough to experiment with for a long time, but of course more is to follow! You can read more on this at the Marble World's Future section.

Here's a picture of the new 4 boosters, paintable & customizable in strength. They fit precisely into the tubes & the wooden tracks.



[h2]May 7th[/h2]
At 9:00 AM PDT The game will be available for purchase for a price of 10 Euro / 12 USD or your country's currency equivalent. During Early Access the price will remain the same, and will go up when it goes out of Early Access.


[h2]Marble World's Future[/h2]
As for the Marble World future, the aim is to have a 2-3 week patch cycle. Meaning you will get content everytime along with bugfixes & improvements. The content can be new marble skins, marble effects, track pieces, decorational items and paint! Other things will be implemented as well, think of features in terms of a marble 3rd person camera or various pads that alter marble physics such as flipping the marble's gravity. If you have any cool idea's too, join the Discord and let me know!

There's a lot of cool things planned! I'm not going tell you everything yet as some things should remain a surprise, but are well worth the wait!

Don't forget to join on Discord for the most up-to-date news! https://discord.gg/jbx92tbMSG
You're also free to ask any questions you have!

I hope you all have a good week, only a few days left till Early Access!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hello everyone!

Last few weeks have been filled with polishing & adding some new content! As the last few weeks kick in before the early access launch it's time to focus on the necessary systems that definitely need to be in the game before it goes public.

[h2]Performance System[/h2]
As talked about last post, Marble World will now monitor your performance, and will accordingly slow down time (and thus heavy marble calculations) based on if you are not reaching the desired FPS. This system will be a work in progress for a longer period of time as it requires alot of tweaking based on other people's experiences with it. The desired FPS is currently set at 60, but there will be an option to change it to whatever you would consider a good FPS!

[h2]More Content[/h2]
In the past days I've also worked on some more content! Introducing a new animated marble skin, animated marble paint, some more props & more marble trails!



One of the pictures contains a decoration type that is still work-in-progress. I haven't talked about it yet, but there's a big chance it'll be in Marble World at Early Access launch ;)

As seen on the last picture there's been a revamp of the painting system, it's now located at the bottom right and will pop up as a menu instead of above the bar itself. The UI is close to ready as Marble World now also supports key rebinding! If you don't like moving the camera with the WASD controls you can now bind it to whatever you like! Controller support is one of the other things I'd like to implement but that will take some more time.

[h2]Upcoming Time[/h2]
As maybe noticed, this post came way later than originally said. It requires some time to get it ready and I'd much rather spend that time working on the game ofcourse! So from now on expect a post roughly every 2 weeks instead of weekly.

Next time a newspost arrives it will be right before the Early Access release. I'll go over what's in it and what didn't make it (yet!). From that point on I'll start doing polls in the discord to see what the priority should be for certain features.

Hope you all have a great week!

Don't forget to join on Discord for the most up-to-date news & see whats planned on the roadmap: https://discord.gg/jbx92tbMSG
You're also free to ask any questions you have!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hello everyone!

Last week has been busy revolving around new content. Marble World now has some more decorational items, a newly created animated paint for the tracks, some new awesome track pieces aswell and ontop of that the lighting has been improved for future support.

Let's take a look at some of this new content!

[h2]New Decorational Items[/h2]

Last week some time was spend on finding and/or creating new decorations to place. In this case you can now freely place several types of rocks + some wooden decorational items like houses carved out of wood. With the limited time a week has I've decided not to go completely crazy into the decorational items as the other aspects of the game should be fleshed out more aswell. More to come soon! If you have cool ideas for wooden carved structures let me know in the comments.

P.s. the rocks are still missing a proper texture, which is to come soon aswell.



[h2]Paint and new Track Pieces[/h2]

I wanted to venture out into the more "dynamic" visuals of the game. Up until now it felt abit static / stale with only the marbles moving around. So I decided to create a type of paint (similar to the normal "static" paint I've showcased some posts ago) that is animated. Inspired by Mario Kart's Rainbow Road you can now paint your tracks in a moving rainbow colored style! To complement the heavy colored paint I also added a dark/black paint, both to be seen in the image's / video below.

Next to that marble world now has more track types, there's a singular looping (for the tiny tracks where marbles can't surpass eachother) track and a wide version aswell. I've also created a quarterpipe (one going upwards and one going downwards) to have the ability to create ramps and half loops!

And there's more! I also added 2 new physics based wheels that react to marbles colliding with them!

Video of the wide looping + rainbow + black paint: https://imgur.com/gallery/znQChU7


[h2]Improved Lighting[/h2]

I spend abit of time last week tinkering with the lighting to create a more dynamic setting. (And also support for the future lighting system) Tracks and objects now create a heavier shadow, enabling to create more darker places. And they are now more consistent in coloring aswell. Previously they became lighter of color when placed near lights, (such as the ceiling light) this doesn't happen anymore now.

In the future, you will be able to turn off the lights all together and just have your own placed lights and glow in the dark tracks / marbles be visible. This was the first step towards that. The changes are already visible in the pictures above.

[h2]Next week[/h2]
There are some systems left to create, mainly one that keeps an eye on performance and reacts when things go wrong. That is planned for next week along with more content! As I type there's another animated material in the works which will be presented next week along with the rest of the new content!
Let me know in the comments if you have a cool idea for track pieces, decorations or ideas.

Also don't forget to join on Discord for the most up-to-date news & see whats planned on the roadmap: https://discord.gg/jbx92tbMSG
You're also free to ask any questions you have!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hello everyone!

Since the last update last week alot of progress has been made in the audio department. No game is complete without it, and It's a powerful tool to immersive yourself into a game!

I took some more time for this feature as playing sounds also come with performance hits. (certainly when there's 5k marbles rolling around!) So the majority of the time since last post was basically split between recording the sounds (and optimizing those) and creating a system that wouldn't fry your PC just cause you wanted to play some sound effects.

Now Marble World has a system that checks which marble hitted which object or other marbles! And will generate a realistic collide sound as you would expect from it. By using a system like this I can play different sounds based on what kind of material the marble hitted, wood sounds different from plastic for example!

In that system I also look at how fast the marble went and how big the impact was. All of those factors determine together how loud it should be. The sounds are also positioned at the impact location, this means when wearing a headset you can hear the marbles around you bumping and bouncing away. Playing this using a surround set in your living room for example gives you a really nice immersive feeling of actually being between the tracks you made!

Check out the video below for a quick example! (Use a headset for the best experience)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Next week[/h2]

Next week will be a good one, It's going to be purely content creation! More track types, more marble skins and more decoration items! On top of that I'll livestream some gameplay next week over at: https://www.twitch.tv/marbleworldgame come join in and lets create some cool tracks together!

Also don't forget to join on Discord for the most up-to-date news & see whats planned on the roadmap: https://discord.gg/jbx92tbMSG
You're also free to ask any questions you have!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/?l=spanish