Balance

Inspiration

There used to be a really old game a certain team member of ours played as a child. It doesn't exist anymore, so this is a game idea built from (probably false) memory. All artwork is fanart of maplestory.

What it does

Balance is a webapp game where in each round, the player is shown the states of some balance scales with objects placed on them. The player has to select the heaviest object while the number of objects and scales progressively increases. The player has 1 minute to correctly answer as many rounds as possible for a highscore!

How we built it

TypeScript and JavaScript. Bootleg photoshop to draw fan art for sprites.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge is coming up with an algorithm to generate the states of the balance scales such that there is always a definitive answer. At first, we went the "wrong" direction in trying to find a general algorithm to solve any state. This proved harder than we anticipated as it amounts to solving some system of linear inequalities / intersection of hyperplanes which we are unfamiliar with. After a while, we realised it was sufficient to design an algorithm that iteratively constructs a valid instance.

This led to the next challenge which was implementation. It was challenging because we had little to no experience in javascript and related technologies. We also had no experience designing games in general.