Still Waiting ☕️

What's going on here today? The place is empty and I've been waiting for my cherry pie for ages...

Kill some time while waiting for your order to be prepared by stacking some objects, creating the tallest tower ever seen.
Waiter's gonna be really impressed!

Play it on itch.io on your browser!

Overview

Still Waiting is a small sandbox arcade game where you stack everyday café objects into the tallest possible tower.

It is inspired by Art of Balance, and was developed as a final project of the Physics Programming course for the Master in Computer Game Development.

Gameplay

demo.mp4

Project Setup

You can play the game directly from your browser on itch.io. There you can find downloads for Windows and macOS binaries, too.

Unity Project

If want to inspect the project and play from the Unity editor you'll need to follow this steps:

1. Clone this repo.
2. Install the Coffee Shop Environment asset from Unity's Package Manager.
3. Open the CoffeeShop scene in Assets/Scenes.
4. Hit play and start stacking.

Features

• Physics-based object grabbing and manipulation (forces + torque).
• 2D and 3D dragging modes: XY plane by default, XZ while holding Shift.
  I find the process pretty intuitive, but maybe not perfectly fluid, as far as usability goes.
• Physics spring system to stabilize objects while dragging, otherwise objects start spinning like crazy.
• Camera scrolling when dragging objects or moving the cursor to the screen borders.
• Tower height tracking with accurate real-time updates.

What Worked Well

• Physics grabbing and rotation: feels cool and dynamic, using torque to adjust rotation. Dragging over obstacles can lead to weird behaviors, but the system is actually physically accurate, so I like it.
• Stacking gameplay: works especially well with flat objects, making the tower-building process satisfying.
• Height tracking: simple to implement and highly accurate.

What Did Not Work as Well

• Physics instabilities: when stacking too many objects or working with odd shapes, physics can misbehave.
• Mesh colliders: since Unity only supports convex mesh colliders for rigid bodies, complex shapes lose accuracy (no proper holes or concave geometry).
• Performance limits: too many dynamic objects quickly impact frame rate, so I had to cut on dynamic objects count.

Credits

• Environment and props: Coffee Shop Environment