M0 — The Roll
An isometric marble roller that keeps derailing into other games.
You pick it up in a waiting room. You have ninety seconds. You roll a heavy, slippery marble down a mountain, you take a corner far too fast, and you go over the side — which costs you a second and a half and is, frankly, the best part.
Then the floor turns into a bowling lane.
▸ MODE SHIFT THE PITCH
What it’s for
Marble Madness is the reference, not the target. That game was punishing, precise, and mean. This one is slippery, generous, and stupid on purpose. You basically cannot lose: falling off costs about a second and a half, there are no lives, and there is no death screen worth building.
The roll
The marble is slippery. It overshoots. It gets away from you and goes over the edge while you are still deciding what to do about it. That is the comedy engine, not a defect we are tuning out. If rolling around an empty grey box isn’t funny, nothing downstream saves it.
The camera
Spin the whole world with your other thumb. It’s a toy in its own right, and half the fun is whipping the view around mid-roll and completely losing track of which way is downhill.
The level
A ramp becomes a bowling lane. A corridor flattens into a side-scroller. The gargoyle that has been watching you from the wall this whole time challenges you to a duel. Same marble, different rules, no warning.
▸ MODE SHIFT BOWLING +15s on the clock
Mode shifts
Three of these are built. Each one leans harder on the seam between the game and the mode than the last — deliberately, so the architecture failed early and cheaply instead of late and expensively. How the three fit together →
The floor becomes a lane. Ten pins. Your marble was already the right shape for this.
The camera cuts to a flat side view and the world loses an axis. One stick, one jump, twenty-five seconds.
The gargoyle that’s been watching you from the wall this whole time would like a word. Turn-based. You have two moves and some HP.
▸ MODE SHIFT THE SPEC SHEET physics = nil
Under the hood
The marble is not a rigid body someone configured. It is a sphere solver written from scratch, because the exact quality of the wobble is the product, and you cannot file a bug against a black box about your game not being funny enough.
One more, because it’s the detail everyone asks about: the walls are yellow and red, the floors are grey and orange, and that is a rule rather than a mood. You can spin the camera through a full circle under an orthographic projection, which strips out nearly every depth cue a 3D game normally gets for free. So hue tells you what you can roll on and value doesn’t — the floor deliberately sits between the two wall brightnesses, so there is no threshold you could mistake for one.
▸ MODE SHIFT THE TRUTH
Where it’s at
The gate on this milestone is whether it’s funny, not whether it’s finished.
Working
Rough
Doing now
Tuning it on the phone, with the sliders that are already in the build. Three fingers on the screen opens them mid-roll. That’s the whole remaining job of this milestone.
There is no mailing list yet, no launch date, and no App Store page. There is an email address, and a person who reads it.
Press should start at the press kit instead.
