Inside a world of wobbles, wiggles and sticky hand thievery in Rubblar
Rubblar sees you using a long rubber hand to steal things from twisty-turny environments while on a tight time limit. Players will need to use their stretchiness to pull their purloined items back in time before they get caught.
Game Developer spoke with Thibaud Goiffon and Sander Vanhove, creators of this game of sticky banditry, to talk about the work that went into making their sticky hand movements feel right, how they create a jiggly, wobbly feeling throughout all of the game's elements, and how the game's wiggly style let them get away with some extra quirkiness in its mechanics.
What drew you to mix sticky rubber hands and robbery in Rubblar? Where did the idea for this game come from?
Goiffon: The game was made as part of a 20-second game jam. The main constraint was pretty big, as the main game loop had to be completed in this short amount of time. Initially, the idea was rather vague, and we went off in many different directions. We started to joke about a robber with a very dramatic backstory with rubber arms who needed to steal stuff in a store for the sake of his family, but the store would be filled with many different items, and some of them were pretty lame. The goal was to steal the best ones. We took this premise and threw in some gameplay ideas. At this stage, we were on track to make the final game.
Can you tell us about how you designed the wiggly hand and your choice to have it reel back quickly at the press of a button? What thoughts went into designing what players could do with this grabbing hand?
Goiffon: Although Godot’s physics engine does the heavy lifting, the physics of the arm was quite hard to come up with. We both tried different approaches. We knew that the hand was the main element of
Read more on gamedeveloper.com
