Untangle Puzzle 3D

Context

Coloured ropes hang from pegs, knotted around each other. You move the buttons at the bottom to untangle them, and you only get so many moves.

First contact with rope simulation: make ropes tangle, then stop them passing through each other

First rope simulation

This was my first contact with rope simulation, and the first problem was the obvious one: how do you make ropes tangle at all, and then stop them passing through one another once they do.

Bonuses sharpened it into a design problem too. A button can sit under a lock while the key hangs on a different rope, so the order in which you untangle becomes the puzzle.

Authoring the levels turned out to be as hard as the simulation. A tangle is not something you can specify on paper, so I built a tool for it: load a plain prefab, drag the ropes into the knot you want by hand, and save their positions to a config. The level is authored in the editor and serialised, not written.

Worth calling out

I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.

The ropes

• Tangling behaviour, and keeping ropes from passing through each other.
• Move limits, bonuses and the lock-and-key dependency between ropes.

The tooling

• An authoring tool that turns a hand-made knot into a saved level configuration.

More from the game

Project facts

Year

2022

Role

Unity Developer

Team

Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me

Scope

Solo developer, concept to release

Studio

Vira Games

Released as

Medoc Games

Engine

Unity, C#

Platform

Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore

Target device

Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM

Order

Fourth commercial project

Note

First project using rope simulation

Ropes

Three to six per level, four in most of them

Puzzle rules

Lock-and-key across ropes and move-limited bombs came from the design doc

Where to see it

Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Untangle Puzzle 3D

Tools & techniques