It's really commendable these guys focused on making a fun game. The glowing dots are easy to avoid and even the story they tell is not intrusive. It's an understandable compromise!
Yeah, they really should be some kind of powerup so you're incentivized to hit them.
Right now learning about the company feels like a penalty which I doubt was the intent.
Also for anyone who hits a dot and is confused how to get out of the information screen - you just press the arrows. I tried escape and clicking for longer than I would care to admit before I realized this.
This game is way better than it needs to be for a quick burst of advertising. Not only is the implementation fantastic, with perfect controls, but the level design is also great. I really enjoyed the multiple routes and the fact you can skip most of the advertising displays.
It seems such a shame that this isn't a full game. Removing the advertising and adding more complex levels with puzzles would make for a perfect little distraction.
Great work, it really captures the feeling of Marble Madness. Its maybe to deep of a thought, but I really fancy the spin of the marble, something that the original was not conveying as fancy as your version does.
Thank you. The physics engine we're using (Rapier) really does most of the work to make the spin of the marble look realistic. But we spent quite some time tweaking the controls to make them as enjoyable as we could.
As a MM fan, I wanted to second this. Great work, engaging enough to make me finish it and wish there were more mechanics like the catapults and enemies.
Nice work! In level 5 there are three bounce green boxes and if you fall on one, it bounces you to second, which bounces to third and you "fall into the void" like noclip through the platform and you respawn under it and instantly die forever. Buggy and not going to start from beginning. Open source it!
This was really fun. Right before this little hole on the second level, my macbook started running a bit slow and the collision detection somehow sucked the marble into the floor.
Physics collision bugs are more likely to occur during frame rate drops. We’ve tried to address this by implementing an auto-respawn mechanism to handle cases where the ball gets stuck inside a collider, but it seems this sometimes fails. Anyway, thank you for playing!
Besides people from the Netlify team who helped write the content and worked on some back-end aspects, the design and development of the game took around 8 weeks for a team of two.
Nice work, love to know more about the technical bits: what framework did you use for 3D scene, objects? how did you handle camera movements to track the ball? What library for sound as that was a nice touch. How did you do physics? Thanks!
Thanks. The WebGL rendering is based on Three.js. We're using Rapier for the physics simulation, and Howler for the audio.
Our game engine is responsible for all the controls and updating things like the camera position (which follows the position of the ball at every frame).
Why did you choose to do things this way instead of using Unity WebGL?
It's okay if the reason is, "because we make websites and the programming we know is Javascript" or whatever. It doesn't have to be about some objective comparison, like optimization or whatever, which isn't going to be true or necessarily matter anyway.
Hmm... Unity WebGL has worked correctly on Mobile Safari since 2013. Support has probably been flawless since around 2019. It has been supported in all the ways that matter for a long time.
Thanks for playing. Actually, your time is displayed once you finish the experience (there are 5 levels in total).
During the project, we discussed adding a speed-run mode but ultimately had to drop this feature due to time constraints. However, we intentionally included some shortcuts in the level design with that intent in mind.
the purpose of the game was to force marketing upon the players. a speed run version would defeat the dwell time of the marketing on the screen. i'm sure the marketing department would not be a fan
I got stuck in the spiral slide on the same level. I got the impression framerate glitches are affecting the collision detection (common physics implementation pitfall). I could be wrong though.
Still, very cool. Too cool to waste on marketing in fact :)
Yeah, sometimes the ball does some crazy things due to the way collision detection works. We tried to optimize and avoid most of the issues but it can happen.
There is code in place to respawn the ball if we detect that it's stuck inside a block or wall, which can occur due to frame drops during the physics simulation. I'll try to reproduce this issue. Thanks for reporting it!
I was being malicious and dropped down onto the hovering pink cube outside the play area on the final level. Once you roll off that pink cube your respawn point is on the cube, leaving you stuck and unable to get back to the main course.
NBD but sharing in case you want this kind of playtesting feedback!
The glowing line represents a timeline of Netlify's milestones that you have to follow in order to discover their journey. No particular reason for the physics-based gameplay except to have a bit of fun.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen an online game correctly tell me to use WARS keys for movement. Big props for handling non-qwerty layouts.
Great job optimizing too. Runs totally smooth on my 2012 macbook and its decrepit HD 4000 iGPU, which is no small feat for web-games these days.
Who is better known for designing the PS4 and PS5.
Edit: can someone explain what netlify does? I visited the site, and while I appreciate it can be difficult to explain these things in marketing blurb, I really came away none the wiser (I work as a programmer so maybe I'm not quite the target market)
I don't know if its still the case but 5+ years ago, Netlify was a pretty robust Jamstack host with built-in CI/CD deployment via git if you didn't want to manage your own VPS.
Kind of off topic, but Marble Madness was a large part of what inspired me to start programming. My dad played it when he was a kid and it made an impression on him, so he had me play it on MAME as a kid. I was blown away by the fact that computers can simulate (fairly complex) falling objects in an isometric space, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to reproduce that in Game Maker 7 at the time. When I got better at math, it influenced a project in my teens that's on my resume to this day.
That was enjoyable. I wasn't at all interested in any of the "Netlify facts" but it was fun to push the marble around and I'm impressed by how smooth the experience was. Well done!
> This seems like a great example of a lot of stuff for which there are few tutorials currently.
Not OP but, what exactly you feel like is missing tutorials? It's a nice little polished experience, but I don't think there is anything particularly innovative or difficult to build with the resources that exists today. Or is there something in particular that looks/seems difficult from what they shared?
I disagree, I think the "nice little polished experience" is the difficult part.
In practice building something like this with resources that exist today can still mean a stream of issues specific to a given platform, browser, library, programming language, IDE, issues related to a combination of any earlier two and a yak that needs shaving[1].
Meanwhile this project is described as[2]:
> fully optimized for both desktop and mobile browsers, with user controls and UI components tailored for each device, ensuring intuitive navigation and interaction across all platforms.
If this process was easy and well documented, Netlify wouldn't hire an external agency.
> I disagree, I think the "nice little polished experience" is the difficult part.
Right, I agree, most of the time will be spent in the polish. But is there really no resources out there on how to polish? Assuming there isn't, what would you want a tutorial to contain to make it apply to a wider audience, as polish is typically hyper-specific to the project.
> If this process was easy and well documented, Netlify wouldn't hire an external agency.
Companies don't typically hire external agencies because something is difficult for them to do per se, but more that it would be wasteful for them to spend the time building something like that instead of focusing on things core to the business.
FWIW: I'm asked parent about this in order to see if there are actual gaps in the available resources today for what parent wanted to do, hence the question to specify what exactly they're looking for. I guess "how to polish" is a valid answer, but again, there are resources out there to help understand how to approach that.
You can't really compare the depth of resources that exists for something like React versus something like Three, which has a bunch of toy examples but no fully coherent experiences.
Companies like Figma have shown that there is a huge appetite for solutions built on top of Canvas or WebGL, but if you don't have the privilege of working for one of these companies that built up lots of proprietary building blocks from scratch, it's much more difficult to get started.
On chapter 2 I liked figuring out how to skip an entire section.
On chapter 3 I fell through the checkerboard immediately the first time; this seems like a bug.
On chapter 4 there are enough paths that it's possible to get slightly lost and not know which way you're supposed to follow the line.
On chapter 5 it's possible to fall onto an isolated island (the pink cube, under the lip) and get trapped forever. I would suggest making "only blue saves your position" a consistent rule rather than the current randomness. At this point I gave up and didn't want to try again from scratch.
Hopefully constructive: Touch controls. If finger is lifted off, even for a second, new "center" is registered, which makes it quite hard to control without looking where the"center" is. Nice soundtrack, quite relaxing.
That's quite fun! I didn't know about "Marble Madness", but it reminded me of Cuboro [1], a (hardware!) toy that consists wooden blocks and allows people to create quite complicated marble runs that look very very similar to this game.
The controls don't seem to work for me. AWSD, only up and down work, unless I try to go diagonally, then it just gets "stuck" moving forever. Arrow keys no directions work unless I hold multiple keys down at once, then it also gets stuck moving.
That's weird, the desktop controls are supposed to work regardless of your keyboard layout. Are you able to play with your arrow keys (which are also supported)?
This is absolutely amazing! Very well executed, congrats!!
I was absolutely terrified at first that falling off would have me start again from the beginning, so I was very careful. Once I did fall and come back where I was I grew bolder which made it more fun. Maybe that should be advertised somewhere.
(I'm still unsure what Netlify exactly is or what it does but this will make me want to find out!)
There's an easy shortcut in the second level past the climb on the pink pipe and before you climb the ramp where you can jump to the semi-circle on the lower platform on the other side. Love it!
Interesting. This consistently crashes my chrome browser whenever I get to the first glowing white checkpoint. But it's not like any crash I've seen before, the page reverts to a google search result I was on this morning. And the whole page is flickering white. That tab was closed long ago, but it seems something in this gets back to that state in memory, maybe a buffer overflow somewhere or something?
While on the google search result, the music from the game is still playing. If I open a new tab, the title of this tab changes from the google title to the netlify one, and vice versa if I change back.
In my experience, flickering often means a GPU-related bug. Sometimes scrolling or alt-tab would help. Sometimes a given top-level window would seem to become "poisoned" so all new tabs would be corrupt too.
I've been enjoying the quality and aesthetics of your studio's work. I would love for you to build a complete game or a longer experience, rather than only for marketing. I love where art and programming intersect. I would love to be able to create experiences like this myself one day.
Thank you for the kind words. We’re glad you enjoy our work!
We’d love to create a longer game someday, but making a living as a small indie studio in the gaming world is definitely challenging. Never say never, though!
I am very curious how the physics feel realy-wordly for the most part at the mathematical level. Are there existing algos that define the gravitational pull of the "Facts" spots or was there a lot of tweaking?
The 45 degree rotation does require more dual input than I care for which makes me wonder if that is a design choice.
The physics engine we are using is Rapier 3D which does a lot of the heavy lifting, even though we had to tweak a lot the physics properties of the ball and surfaces in order to get something that felt right. For hotspots specifically, we implemented the magnet-like effect with custom code (by applying a force that pushes the ball toward the center and slowing it down at the same time) as there is no attractor primitive in Rapier.
The dual input is indeed a consequence of our isometric-view design choice, which I agree may not be the easiest way to control the ball. But the 45 degree angle just looks cooler in our opinion.
The NES Marble Madness port (and probably others) had a choice of control schemes, where the D-Pad is either mapped directly to the screen (Down is down) or mapped at a 45 degree angle (Down is down-right). I never could wrap my head around the latter, but I can see the benefit given the stage layout mostly uses 45 degree paths.
The second scheme works pretty well if you can turn the controller 45º. I never had an NES but I am pretty sure some of the isometric games I played on the c64 and Amiga had this as an option.
FWIW, you can mentally remap the keys to partially eliminate dual input. E.g. Pressing down and right together as a single input moves the marble southeast. This considerably simplifies game play for me.
Got stuck in a re-spawn loop : some collision detection failed in level 4 at the start of a standard 30° incline, the ball fell through, and was re-spawned at the same place resulting in falling again, locking me in loop.
Thanks! Agreed that the mobile experience can sometimes be a little difficult compared to the desktop version. It was hard to get right, and we may have set the ball speed a bit too high.
Thank you so much. This is a great game for my 6yo, it made his day! He loved it. We spent months looking for web games for 6yo without ads, dark patterns and distracting details, but this was the first one that really fit. I wish there would be more similar games.
They possibly could/should add the qualifier of obnoxious ads. Many mobile ads are extremely obnoxious. Especially the ones that hide the "X" or place several "X"s in the interface so it's hard to tell where exactly to tap to get the ad to go away. This game is pretty classy and subtle in comparison. Kind of how Hacker News itself is an ad for YCombinator.
These are ads in the original sense (to advertise something), rather than the modern sense (obnoxious attention-grabbing multimedia presentations); and all of them are skippable, save the victory screen. I do find it quite ironic, though, that the best ad-free video game I've seen this week is an advertisement.
This is exactly how I meant it. From the perspective of my 6yo, who can't really read yet or know what Netlify is, it was also never perceived as an Ad, but a game.
Actually, we used a recording of a basketball for the sound of the marble bouncing. It wasn’t our original intention, as we initially imagined the ball to have more of a metallic quality. However, the rubbery effect kinda works, I guess. :)
So uh, don't try to make the jump from the pink elevator to the solitary pink cube on the last level. If you make it, you're stuck there forever! (I thought it would be a skill jump to an easter egg)
The issue with using the gyroscope is that the Device Orientation API requires websites to request user permission first (at least on iOS Safari), which we feared might drive away too many visitors.
I'll post my slowest time at the bottom of the stack: 5 minutes and 59 seconds
didnt work on FF, and only 1/4 screen on brave
index-dffbfc39.js:4603 expected expression got ?
Anyway great fun, and much easier than what I remember of the Amiga version, very forgiving controls, thanks and well done.
does anybody remember the name of the board game that you turned knobs on the outside of the box to tilt on the x/y axis to drive the marble around the board?
Thanks. Although, just searching for Labyrinth board game brings up things not what I was thinking about, but it was the correct name and got me there.
The rendering engine is using Three.js which is a WebGL library. The physics/collision detection code is using Rapier through a WebAssembly module available on npm [1], which means that it can be used on the web even though it's originally written in Rust.
The levels were built inside the Unity Editor, then exported to FBX, then went through a pipeline based on Blender python scripting that optimized their geometry, assigned materials and exported them to GLTF (the final format that we load in the browser).
thanks for answering! Interesting you used unity for level layout. Interested to hear the advantage here. Considering you already use Blender down the pipe, how come you haven't used Blender for it or any other dcc app lile maya, max, whatever?
The main draw of the Unity Editor for us is how it auto-reloads assets, like 3D models, as soon as the asset file is updated. So the workflow is having your DCC app open in which you model things and export assets from, and Unity Editor to design your level where every model is always up-to-date.
This is not possible with Blender because it contains all models inside a single .blend file, so assets must be manually re-imported each you change them. There is a Link feature in Blender but in my experience it's not as good as what Unity does out of the box.
Nothing complicated, we simply have initialization code that parses the GLTF scene on startup by iterating over the children of a specific group, and creating Rapier colliders for each of them (Triangle Mesh Colliders to be specific, in order to allow things such as curved ramps). Since their geometry is very simple, we can use directly the rendering geometry for the collider geo.
Not the dev, but Rapier has a JavaScript binding through WASM. And you can design the levels with a 3d tool like Blender, then script out the animation.
Seems like the ball is 0.5m in diameter, if you treat single wireframe texture tile as 1m. Gravity seems to be correct for the ball of this size (although linear dampening aka air resistance is quite high).
I think this is intentional, since higher gravity/smaller ball would significantly raise difficulty.
We tried to implement a workaround for that [1], but for some reason it still shows up from time to time. I really wish iOS Safari gave developers a way to disable these gestures!
I got stuck in the second chapter. Went into a tube leading to a spiraling green slide and my ball reset... to the interior of the block. Oh well, cool project.
#2. The "ROI calculator" steered me to enter in my name, e-mail, and phone number. I don't want to sign up to get spam from a salesman just to find out the basics about some tool or platform.
#3. Wikipedia's page for Netlify has a content warning that the content appears to be an ad brochure, but at least it said this:
"Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites.
The company enables building, deploying, and scaling websites whose source files are stored in the version control system Git and then generated into static web content files served via a content delivery network."
Still have no idea what Netlify does (beyond what I can already do with git with a few clicks), or if it's right for our team, or if we can even afford it.
The Marble game was quite fun, however...
#4. The main thing that stuck in my mind from the little "milestones" about Netlify was that they changed their logo. This may seem significant to the Netlify team, but is completely irrelevant to the rest of us.
#5. The second thing was that they "bought Squirrel, an open source"... it is rather dystopian to hear that someone "bought" an open source platform.
Since we have a few Netlify people posting here, please feel free to correct my ignorance or point me in the right direction.
Used Netlify back in the day (prior to Cloudflare pages / workers sites). The experience was largely smooth.
HOWEVER, pricing was both opaque and prone to explode without warning, with little to no way of setting billing limits. Ultimately, that was too risky for the kind of small-ish projects I'm running.
They had the Netlify CMS for a while, which I quite liked. But that's gone now.
Be interesting to know what their USP is over CF Pages.
> The company enables building, deploying, and scaling websites whose source files are stored in the version control system Git and then generated into static web content files served via a content delivery network.
That’s the meat of it. It’s Heroku for statically generated websites or websites that can run as lambdas. Pretty limited but very fast for those purposes cause everything is handled by edge servers rather than primary data center servers.
I spotted Little Workshop when I saw https://equinox.space/ on Hacker News and noticed it was running on Netlify. Loved the fluidness, speed and art direction of a game running directly in the browser and working smoothly on my phone.
Immediately thought of them when we started thinking about a 5 million developer celebration and reached out. Love the result :)
We’re very grateful for the opportunity to create this experience! Huge thanks to you and the Netlify team for supporting innovative campaigns like this one.
I knew I recognized the feel of this project. It did quite well on the front page [0]. Hopefully you and others keep hiring them so we can keep enjoying their work!
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