GravityCopter

Gameplay GIF of a silly low-resolution helicopter dodging between grassy columns against a blue background

Gameplay GIF of a silly low-resolution helicopter dodging between grassy columns against a blue background amid purple pieces of physics debris

Gameplay GIF of world speed being manually increased at runtime

Gameplay screenshot screenshot of the main menu, just a title, play/quit buttons, and the controls

Gameplay screenshot of the toggleable statistics overlay, showing world speed, gravity direction and magnitude, etc.

Gameplay screenshot screenshot of the gameover menu with Play Again and Main Menu buttons

Background

GravityCopter is was one of my simpler, but well-architected hobby games. During a vacation in 2019, my brother-in-law had the idea for a Flappy Bird-style game where, rather than applying an upward force to stay aloft and avoid obstacles, the player would toggle the direction of gravity. The idea felt like something that I could hack together quickly, both to impress my brother-in-law and to challenge myself. So, in about two nights, I coded all the logic to toggle gravity, put together a basic main menu and game-over menu flow, and created/imported all the artwork and sounds myself (do note that my skills are in code, not art or music!). I also added a bunch of little purple "debris" that are also affected by gravity to add some fun "chaos" to the gravity-switching.

Technical Details

I am proud of several technical details in this game:

The scrolling background recycles "wall" objects from an object pool. The walls move past the player at constant speed to achieve the illusion of constant motion, without increasing the player's x-position indefinitely.
Walls heights are randomly staggered each time around, but within configurable limits, so that the player always has enough room to pass between them.
Walls also use 9-sliced sprites so that the textures on walls of different heights do not appear awkwardly stretched.
The force of gravity is scaled up to 3x for falling bits of debris. This adds more motion to the scene; without the scaling, it just felt like debris was moving up and down in sync to the player.
For troubleshooting, I added inputs to toggle a "statistics overlay" that shows current world speed, direction/magnitude of gravity, etc. I also added inputs to increase/decrease the world speed
The game code is well-architected, I think, employing the Single Responsibility Principle and event-driven programming.
It uses my UnityUtil library for dependency injection and some utility code.
The main menu actually has a Quit button: an oft-overlooked feature in tiny games like this!