Easy, Zen, Polished
Soft Obby
Genre: Platformer
Played: 17,000 Times
Published: 2023
What would a polished easy obby look like?
Soft Obby started as a collaboration between my roommate at the time and I. For those of you unfamiliar with Roblox slang, an “Obby” (short for obstacle course) is a straight forward platformer where you complete small movement based challenges. Easy Obbys are a sub genre that are aimed at younger folks and those playing on phones. They have a reputation for being quick to produce, low effort, and of dubious quality.
Our original inspiration manifested into a couple of goals: each stage should have something interactive/moving, every system should be polished with satisfying feedback, and the whole game should have a zen flow to it.
After some brainstorming and prototyping my co-collaborator got busy with other projects and left me to work on it alone. With nothing but my scope creep to keep me company what was a simple idea quickly blossomed into systems for a full inventory, LOD actions, and procedural pet combination.
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Having everything move and interact with the player sounds like a great idea, but there’s a catch; moving things around isn’t free. Especially on older phone hardware having 500 objects moving on their own isn’t cheap, much less the amount needed to keep all 100 stages interesting.
To this end I created what I call the LOD action system. It works similarly to a traditional geometry LOD system, the closer you are to an object the more it moves. When you reach a certain threshold of distance the object stops moving and it’s handler is loaded out.
Each moving part defines an action associated with it (things like appearing or disappearing when the player is close, or moving between positions) and some arguments. Then each action handler has an update step that takes in the normalized distance from the player and the passed game time. Using the distance from the player the action can make it’s movement smaller the further the player is. In addition having the position be based on the elapsed game time means syncing up movements between clients is easy!
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There’s nothing more satisfying than collecting some shiny coins, so obviously a polished obby needed to have some coins of it’s own. In Mario collecting 100 coins earns you an extra life, but with unlimited lives I needed to find something else for players to spend their money on!
I came up with two things that players could sink money into: Locked doors that could be purchased to unlock new routes, and aesthetic items that could be used to bling out players characters.
This necessitated an inventory UI and shop UI, as well some shop locations where players could pick up items. There’s also a 3 item shop that is accessible from anywhere and updates every 6 hours with a chance to contain any item in the game!
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The decorative items that are available for the players to buy take the form of trails (colorful banners that the player leaves behind them) and pets (cute lil dudes that follow you around). Pets are common in Roblox games, and so I wanted to spice them up a little bit.
What better way to spice up pets than by allowing players to slam two of them together into a single unholy beast!? To achieve this when I modeled the pets I made sure to split them up into distinct parts: Head, Legs, Wings, Tail, Detail1, and Detail2. Then in order to combine them you simply flip a coin for each part and take one or the others. This is a trivial system to implement, but can result in some surprising and fun combinations.
