First Update Since GGJ: Menus & Bubble Jiggle!

Update v0.1.2:

• Add some menus (was literally just the game loop before)
  • Title screen: play, settings, and quit
  • Pause menu: resume, settings, restart, and quit to title
  • Settings: full screen, volume, and (desktop only) anti-aliasing
• Make bubbles respond realistically to clicks
  • Woo, jiggle physics!
• Collecting bubbles is more realistic
  • Not instant, moves and stretches toward collected bubble
• Updates to some of the levels
  • Level 6 is slightly easier now, and has cool bubble at the end
  • All levels have pre-set collectible bubble colors (instead of random)

I've finally gotten the first update since the game jam officially done (v0.1.2)! It took a bit with work and life happening, and I actually got it pretty much done like a week ago, but only finalized and uploaded now. It's now in a state where I'm pretty happy with it, as it has a lot of stuff that was missing in the initial upload for the GGJ. I have more updates planned, though I'm not sure if / when I will get to that, since I have other things I need to get done as well as another jam coming up (I plan on entering Ludum Dare in April).

The part that I think I spent the most time on, and had the most fun with, was the bubble jiggle physics. I find it very satisfying now that when you bounce the bubble around it reacts realistically. There's also some fun to be had on the play button too! In the initial version, the jiggle was just a very stiff-looking animation.

If you'd like to compare, I left the version v0.0.2 available to download as well (but you can't play the web version). The source can be found on my GitHub: https://github.com/Zshandi/GGJ-2025-Bubble-Project

How I Made the Bubbles Jiggle

To start, I just wanted to be able to squish the bubble by scaling it along an arbitrary axis. Since transformations only allow scaling along the x and y axis, I had to first rotate it, scale it, then rotate it back to allow the diagonal axes. Next, I wanted to make the jiggle bounce realistically like a spring, so I used the spring equation (acceleration proportional to the stretch amount in the opposite direction).

To make it very natural and dynamic, I also wanted to allow multiple jiggles being applied simultaneously with different frequencies and magnitudes, as well as attenuations. So, I had each jiggle be an instance of a class, which I would then loop through, update state, and re-apply each frame. Once a jiggle had faded, it would also get removed to avoid leaky memory.