Magnetic Butterfly is a game about life, death, and a butterfly born with a wrecking ball.

Magnetic Butterfly

Magnetic Butterfly is a game that was developed using Unity3D and is designed around the concept of a small butterfly moving by struggling against the weight of a massive ball. The goal of the game is to stay alive for the duration of the level timer while also acquiring as many points as possible. The butterfly cannot cause damage or hit point spheres itself, so she must rely on the manipulation of her birth ball to do her dirty work. Click the Play button in the header to play.

Gameplay

The life of a butterfly is limited. The life of a butterfly with an enormous wrecking ball is limited to about three and a half minutes. During that time, the butterfly must not only stay alive against the emotional spirits that haunt the arena, but she must also continually knock away point spheres with her wrecking ball to prolong his life and increase his score. The wrecking ball may be heavy, but it's the butterfly's only chance to survive for her depressingly short life span.

Development

Magnetic Butterfly is a game developed solely by Trent Polack (me!). From the very first build, one of the goals of Magnetic Butterfly was to have it be a constantly-updated public prototype that received development over time based heavily on public player feedback. Since the premise of the game can easily lead to player frustration, one of my goals to was to quickly iterate on feedback to continually refine the core mechanics to be as player-friendly as possible. And, while doing this, still staying true to the primary design tenant of the player being forced to utilize the weight and power of the wrecking ball without ever directly controlling it.

Unity

Magnetic Butterfly is a 3D game developed using Unity3D. This game can be played within your web browser after the simple, easy-to-install Unity plugin has been automatically installed (with your permission).

Play Magnetic Butterfly

Objective

Do not let the life bar along the top of the screen reach zero; knock the glowing point spheres out of the arena to not only increase the butterfly's life, but accumulate points. Eventually, emotional spirits will start to haunt the butterfly, so she will need to destroy them with her wrecking ball.

Controls

Move the butterfly around with the W, A, S, and D keys (or Directional Arrows). The space bar can be used to magnetize the butterfly to the arena surface in short bursts (that automatically recharge when not in use).

Inspiration

The inspiration for Magnetic Butterfly came, for the most part, out of nowhere. I knew I wanted to do a game using Unity and, further, that I wanted to make a game that revolved around a unique use of an interesting physics system. And then, shortly afterwards, I thought about how interesting it would be to play a game where the player was a tiny, powerless butterfly that had to rely on some bigger entity to do its dirty work (which was inspired, in part, by a friendship I had in my final year of college -- I wasn't the big, scary guy). What came out of this was the original title for the game: The Butterfly and the Wrecking Ball.

Development Journal

You can visit Polycat.net if you want to see all development journal entries relating to Magnetic Butterfly.