Here's a little mindless fun to get your gears turning and your week started on this first Monday of July: Orb Avoidance, a simple game of mouse avoidance with the added bonus of a combo system, created by Kalinium.
Most everyone has probably played avoidance games before. They are generally based on a very simple gameplay mechanic such as moving the mouse cursor around a maze without touching the edges. Some have you moving an object with the keyboard or the mouse while avoiding various shapes that fly about the screen.
In Orb Avoidance, small orbs move directly toward the mouse cursor, though in an elastic-like motion. The first objective is to always avoid the orbs. There are also small gray squares that will pop up randomly from time to time. These are also to be avoided.
By moving the mouse around you will be able to 'fool' the orbs into colliding with the gray squares; doing so destroys the orbs. Clear all the orbs from play to summon the next wave, which always includes 1 additional orb. An additional gray square appears every 5 waves (thanks Khrisper!).
Where the game gets somewhat interesting is when you begin to destroy enough orbs within a short amount of time. The outer edges of the play field begin to 'fill up' with color indicating the rising 'combo'. Continue the rate at which you are clearing the orbs and eventually the combo will fill in its entirety turning red and releasing lots of color with every orb destroyed. This indicates that your score is increasing at its greatest capacity. Keep the combo red and last as long as possible for the greatest score you can.
The random placement of the gray squares will play a large role in how successful you are, so there is a lot of luck to this game. But it's both frustrating and rewarding just enough to be an addictive little game with which to spend 10-15 minutes for a break. Play Orb Avoidance.
Cool game, awesome, but it got way too easy as many sqaures popped up and you could keep all the balls in one little clod by moving in circles. That kind of thing is the curse of bullet avoidance games. Still, pretty good, shiny.
Love it! I've only played for a few minutes since I'm so tired but it's just the kind of simple game I like to play (especially at work where I have a few minutes here and there :P) Will play again. Thanks Jay! ;D
Yeah, what the others said - good game, but what this game needs is a wave counter so you know how many rounds you have done and know how many orbs will chace you next wave. At the end of every 5th wave, you get a new box.
My only critique is that a current-score meter might be nice, but perhaps they left it out deliberately. This is a very nice game.
Good game, and if you get frustrated just wait for a box to appear close to an edge.
Position your cursor as close to the middle of the box as possible, on the edge closest to the border.
If you do it just right, the balls can't clear the edge of the box, and you can let the game play itself until it bogs down (and I guess eventually crashes!). I managed 361694 this way until I got bored.
I just stuck my mouse between two very close boxes and escaped the window through the right-click menu. They still ram the boxes, but I'm able to type this comment.
It's going at this moment, in fact.
Total Score:
1,054,029
I did the same thing and ended up with 1467426 points.
As Dave pointed out, if a box is very close to the top or bottom wall, then you can hide next to it on the wallward side and most of the balls won't be able to get to you. This could be improved by not generating boxes too close to the walls.
After that, though, you can still hide right next to a box on their left or right sides, and the balls will usually hit the box before they hit you. This looks like some sort of bounding box or collision detection issue.
One possible fix to this issue would be for boxes to only take so many hits, then they disintegrate or disappear (or better yet, explode). That'd force the player to always be on the move, never knowing which ball will be the last one a box can withstand.
An even easier fix may be to have the boxes move. That might be a better challenge, anyway.
(On top of this, the game suffers from pretty bad slowdown (2 fps) once you get into the hundreds of thousands of points. I guess there's not much to be done about that, though.)
I agree that score/wave displays would be nice on top of that, but that's not as necessary as the gameplay improvements.
I can't seem to get past 23, can someone post a walkthrough?
Good game,but the music makes me feel like I'm going insane.
AtnNn:
Walkthrough:
1) Move your cursor
2) Don't touch the balls
3) Don't touch the boxes
4) Make the balls touch the boxes.
TADA! :-)
Another solution would be a decrease in boxes, instead of an increase. Even when you do move around, an increasing number of boxes decreases difficulty.
also note that if there is a box alone in the middle away from other boxes you can make continuous circles around the box. if your cursor continuously moves fast enough it seems there is no detection with ball collision. careful not to hit the box you're circling, tho.
My orbs keep exploding in thin air, far away from the gray square. I dont get the point of this game
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