This is pretty amazing. I didn’t contact any press about it, and the only promotion I did was the long and rambly videos I’ve been posting here, if you can call them that. Being free, unsurprisingly, makes a big difference. More interesting stats:

• 71% of Floating Point players own Gunpoint, 22% own the Exclusive ($30) Edition.
• 203 people have reviewed it, 198 of them positively.
• After the US (15k) and the UK (6k), Russia and Poland have the most players with 5k each – all other countries are under 3k.
• The average play session is 12 minutes, which is about how long I usually play for too.
• The 22,000 players Steam has sampled to get play-time stats have, between them, spent more than a year playing.
• If the other 48,000 have played similarly, that’d be more then four years of play time.
• The game took 21 days to make.

Floating Point is based on some grappling hook code I made for a game that I still plan to continue with some day. Since I was using version control for that, and hence for this, I have a log of every ‘commit’ I made during development: basically, all the times I felt my progress was worth backing up, and what that progress was.

With a bit of hackery, I’ve pulled out a list of those in chronological order to make a sort of diary of the game’s development, showing which days I worked on it and what I did. Obviously this contains some references to things only I’ll understand, but most of it’s in English, and it gives you an idea of how the game evolved and how long it took. I’ll highlight major developments or revelations, and add in when I tested and with how many people.

Floating Point was made in Unity, using Visual C# 2010 Express for code.

Generally the days when there are only a few commits, I probably only worked on it for an hour or two. The ones with about ten commits were probably full days.

Laugh! As I declare it basically finished on day 6.
Cry! As I fail to get a low pass filter working on a non-looping AudioSource!
Marvel! As I flounder to figure out how to ‘revert’ a crazy change, and have to revert my own revert before I can revert.

If you want a bit more context, I talk through most of this stuff in the Floating Point dev log videos I did as I went along.

Idea: 26th of April

Day 1

Added water level, buoyancy works, kinda fun!
New arena, slightly reduced buoyancy.
dno
Splash sounds and levelling out on surface.
Sound selection fixed
All sounds done.
Random level generation, looking nice and chunky and glitchy.
Colours, bounciness, bigger levels, density.
Muuuuch prettier.

Day 2

Velocity Points system working, feels great!
Linerenderer and help text both in.
Sounds added, ready to show.
Bar graphs working, feels nice.

1 day gap

Day 3

Buttons to adjust density and decay. Music imported but not added yet.
Dynamic music in, no permission yet.

Day 4

Quieter music, now with permission!
Prototype 3 – full credits, help text, adjustable density and decay.
Trying to get line to shade, abandoning
Rope now glows.
Fixed the jerky jounce exploit! Everything’s super smooth and nice now (if a little easy)
Background level and fog done, working on switching it in.
Level shuffling working beautifully, currently increases Decay.
Level transitions now beautiful, with sound.
Prototype 5, plus density starts low and builds.

3 day gap

Day 5

Starts much easier
Filter is on audio listener now, splash restored.
Put grapple impact sound on its own audiosource and it STILL RANDOMLY FUCKING FAILS to apply the low pass filter.
Reinstated custom grpaple sound because fuck Unity’s ability to apply filters. Restored slack. Given music a minimum volume to come back from.
Variable cutoff with depth. Everything except difficulty choice and score bar in.
Easier and Harder switching working.
Boundary bouncing, everything kinda working now. Just need score readout/reset, maybe make sparse levels easier and less dark?

Day 6

Fixed fog, better boundaries, level transitions look lovely, minimum rope length, took slack out again.
Score font in, now pauses on run?
Prototype 5 candidate: just needs integer pickup value and better help text presentation.
Actually we’re on Prototype 7. Tweaked some text and made decay rate kinder.
Bar values pop up, fade out nicely.
Awesome new font, regrettably named Dots All Folks.
Buttons coming along.
Menus working and looking nice
That’s it, I think we might be basically done. Release candidate?
Forgot to tidy up controls for launcher. Also I should credit the font creators.

First test: Windows, 20 people

Day 7

Patch 1: custom cursor shows where you can grapple, much faster retract, much nice retract noise, much more reliable collision.
Whoops, cursor fixed.
Experimenting with left-click always casts grapple, disconnecting if nec.
Left click retracts but never disconnects, prefer this.
Massive cleanup, level transitions fixed, grapple never misses.
Credits in and control text tweaked, just needs a bit of rebalancing now.
Release Candidate 2 – balance tweaked, input menu tidied.

Day 8

Restored points penalty for collisions – it got lost when we separated Accumulatedpoints from Velocitypoints.
Tweaks menu, with rope and bar stats.

Second test: Mac and Linux, 15 people

2 day gap

Day 9

Version released to SusDev beta list: saves and loads tweak files.
High score tracking and overlapping bars working, feels great.
Tinkering with level end GUI layout

Third test: Windows, 2000 people

Day 10

High scores and bars working as fully as I intend to make them for now.
Version 11 (input stuff cleaned up, all warnings fixed)
Player is round, glow is much nicer, physics feel a bit better? Menu button width glitch fixed.
Adjustable level width and height, now saves to file.
Saves to file and resets defaults.
Level size tweaks complete, level regens as you cahnge them, score resets, etc.
Floor scales with water, but now I’m getting lighting glitches again.
Fixed glitchy lighting by making them ‘important’. Floor and water extend outwards, barrier is more generous, feels less claustrophobic.
130 height now default
Level height UI change, regen level on load custom tweaks file.

Day 11

Shorter pickup sound seems to fix the crackling.
LEvel gen parameter tweaks, more space underwater, no tiny blocks.
Version 12: slightly taller levels, shorter underwater sound.

Fourth test: Mac & Linux on Steam, 20 people

Day 12

Trails! OMG
Trail is now dynamic and basically perfect.
Dimmed background lights, stopped rope from glowing.
Nutty idea – hitting blocks destroys them and their points bar. Needs to also destroy thier light, not destroy the floor, and ungrapple you if you’re attached.
Reverting breaking-blocks idea.
Revert “Reverting breaking-blocks idea.”
Revert “Nutty idea – hitting blocks destroys them and their points bar. Needs to also destroy thier light, not destroy the floor, and ungrapple you if you’re attached.”
Put the colour back in the rope, it makes it easier to see.
Floor removed, bouyancy increased, level boundaries more generous, feels lovely.

Day 13

Limited bars per level, makes huge levels awesome, sparse levels great too.
Fills more of the underwater space.
Trails revealed at end of level – needs some tweaks though.
Tweaking trail reveal, but still no good solution – probably need two trail renderers. Take it out for now and do more important stuff first.
HUD-less screenshot function added, bars left display finished.
This time without committing the screenshots themselves.
Blerg, hadn’t saved Scene.
Control page tweaks, nicer score bar, surely some more important stuff. Bigger water. Less music cutoff.
First stab at random level configs. Some sure suck! Add debug stuff to tell you what the settings are on each.

Day 14

Regen key in, density and size ranges tweaked, not really having a huge amount of fun.

Day 15

30 bars per level, trailwidth correctly reset.
Level width fixed, fail-grapple crash fixed, lighting fixed, variables rebalanced, ‘next level’ key, thicker rope, bigger zoom.
Version 16 (input menu cleaned, fixed scores file startup recognition)
Sparser first level, Easier key removed, always-red rope is easier to see.
Fixed parameters not getting randomised, made rope clearer, made enter work on macs.
Heat Vision trails on end of level!
Lovely fadey outy whole-path trail at end of level.
Changed main trail to use white material and colour it red – bit brighter, smoother fade out, dunno if better?
Cool blue trace when complete level, looks super cool. Change your light and rope to match?

Day 16

All colours go cool after completing a level, plus score loading is fixed.
Restored the old triple-transparent trail.
Tweaks now adjust average and variance of level height and density.
More consistently easy first level, code cleaned up to avoid public nuisance, level competion sound.
Credited Toyoto correclty.

Day 17

Better credits.

15 day gap

Day 18

Removed colordivisor warning, renamed mantissascollected.

Day 19

Icon, beginnings of a tutorial level.
Refined tutorial level.
Turorial text
Tutorial test
Reverted density tweak, player spawns a little higher

Fifth test: Windows on Steam, 20 people

Day 20

Dynamic retract speed working and feels really nice.
Lower max speed, no water impact penalty.
SteamCloud build: customise retract bonus, tweaked retract defaults, no water impact penalty, closer zoom level, dot always orange, probably some other stuff.

Day 21

25 bonus retract kicks in linearly under barheight*2.
Minor cleanup to remove unused variables. This build deployed to Steam.

Release: 6th of June 2014

So in all, I worked on it 21 different days spread over about 5 weeks.

Lots of people have asked about how you get a free game on Steam. I can’t speak to Valve’s policy’s in general, I just asked them if they wanted it and they said yes. My understanding is that if you don’t already have a game on Steam, you need to go through Greenlight, as Zoe did with Depression Quest.

Lastly, CannonFodder_ on Twitter asked for tips on random level generation in Unity, so I pasted a cleaned-up version of Floating Point’s very simple level generator.

Hope some of that is of interest!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape.

Here’s a trailer, and some info on why it’s free.

Why is it free?

When I announced this yesterday, it was met with enthusiastic response:

@Pentadact what!

— Steve Gaynor (@fullbright) June 5, 2014

@Pentadact what in the shit

— kate (@shegeekshow) June 5, 2014

@Pentadact Wha..? Why's it free??

— Tap to Win (@TapToWin) June 5, 2014

When Gunpoint came out, and did well, I thanked those who bought it for putting me in a position where I didn’t have to actively chase money with everything I do. In return, I promised to “make new things for you!”

I started Floating Point for the Ludum Dare game jam two months ago, but when it started to feel like it could be something more, I let myself pursue it. I just added what it seemed to need at each stage, and worked on it for as long as I felt it needed work. It was a fantastic experience, I’m really proud of the final thing, and I could never have done that if I was struggling to feed myself.

Floating Point probably could make money – if I was a publicly traded company, it would probably have to. But because I’m just a person, I’d rather just give it away as a thank-you. And because you’ve let me become completely independent, I can.

Thanks again.

• Get it on Steam.
• Watch the development log.

• Floating Point is coming to Steam!
• Tomorrow!
• On Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously!
• And it’s free!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape.

The only objective is to collect points, and the only thing that increases your points is swinging swiftly, smoothly and elegantly without hitting anything. As you pick up momentum, you start to glow, the bars you’re collecting rise up, the music kicks in, and your trajectory burns a bright red line in the air, drawing huge, beautiful mathematical curves of your arcing flight.

You can see some nice shots of it below and some nicer ones here.

One effect I fancied but considered low priority was some kind of trail: maybe particles or sparks or something. So I had a quick look to see how hard this would be in Unity, and discovered something called a Trail Renderer. I tried it, and it looked like this:

That looks fucking great! And its length is defined by a ‘time’ property, which I could scale with some measure of your flow. As well as being a reward, this turned out to have a great kind of selective memory: when you’re doing well, a huge length of your beautiful arcing movements still hangs glowing in the air. When you’re screwing up, your trail is short and fades quickly so the ugly evidence doesn’t stick around long.

It leads to all kinds of lovely patterns.

And it means each screenshot tells a little story of what was going on when you took it. So I added a screenshot key that removes the hud and saves a PNG at double your current resolution (good for thin trails when you’re zoomed out).

When I showed this to my friend Owen, he liked it, and suggested that at the end of the level it could show you your whole path from start to finish. That’s not easy with a single trail renderer, because when your trail fades out its positions are forgotten, but I managed to do it by adding a second one that’s hidden until you complete the level.

It was… a little hard to read. So I thought about giving it heat vision colours: you know, where it fades from dark purple to bright yellow to show different heat levels. That was less successful.

The original red was cool, but I just wanted it to feel different: the level’s over now, and you’re just swinging around to paint the air and create cool patterns. It’s a shift of tone that seemed to need a shift in colour, so I tried the only other colour in Floating Point’s palette.

That was just what I wanted – it’s still insane, and gets more so if you keep swinging around after it’s over, but it feels cooler, more relaxed, kind of reflective. It’s still bright and clear, which makes it really satisfying to describe these smooth arcs through empty space, but hopefully not as cluttered. And a little brightness near the player helps you distinguish which bits of it are most recent.

I’ve got some more exciting news about Floating Point to share, but I want to wait till I have a release date, which shouldn’t be long now. I’m still asking on Twitter for small batches of testers sometimes, so follow me there if you want to get in on that.

In the meantime, here are some more traily screenshots.

My game about swinging through randomly generated spaces has spilled out from a game jam entry, to a four-day game, to a week-long game. This is a series of three video blogs talking about interesting things that happened in its design.

Here’s my previous video showing the game itself.

Update: it actually took five weeks, but now it’s done and out and on Steam and free and half a million people played it! More info on the tag.