Eggy's Games

A long time ago when coding around in Flash 15 years or so ago. I thought how about using the built in lineRenderer to move between circles that you could drag. Then how about if those lines had collisions on them to light up the nodes? Well turns out that little idea went viral and spawned a small series.

The First Nodes

The first Nodes game was very basic, in fact they weren't even lasers. They were just lines. This game was quite simple in nature but as far as I'm aware there weren't any like it at the time. I made it in less than a few weeks.

It only needed a few movieclips for each circle, each one drawed a line to the next and then a collisions detection on the line for passing through circles. If all the circles were lined up that's a win. Sounds simple but can get complex fast.

The game has very basic graphics and ended up being played over 10 million times online according to Mochibot at the time. Which is now a website that is no longer available unfortunately.

The game made me some nice ad revenue and I thought well it's time to improve it!

It even spawned people making tutorials about my game in places like Emanuele Feronato's game making site here!

Nodes 2

I decided to ramp up the sequel as fast as possible and make it much more improved in Nodes 2. I didn't want to half ass it so I made a full on level editor so people could make their own levels and share them with friends. This proved to be quite popular at the time. The way this worked was embedding X and Y coordinates of every object into a string of letters and numbers so if you paste them in the level editor it is essentially just rearranging everything based on the coordinates extrapolated from these strings.

I also decided to mix it up by adding in curved blue lines using a CurveTo maths function on the lineRenderer, this turned out....interesting. It resulted in some very crazy levels later on. Involving straight and curved lines.

The game did fairly well once again. People gave it many views and plays. It was especially popular in Mexico for some reason. The reason why still has me boggled to this day! Espanol si(?)

Re-Created in Unity as Laser Nodes

Now that I had learned a new game engine many years later I thought I would do the game justice by remaking it with the graphics it deserved and this time I could actually give it proper lasers. I mean that's what it really needed all along right?! I was able to use a custom made unity shader tutorial to replicate a laser and apply it to my lineRenderer. Interestly enough, is that the lineRenderer in Unity was very similiar to Flash so replicating it wasn't too big an issue. You can play Laser Nodes here.

ooooo shiny lasers!

Now I couldn't just re-create the game and call it a day or otherwise I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So this time I decided to really test myself and make lasers bounce off mirrors and almost any surface. This means the laser could bounce infinity times creating some of the most craziest levels you will ever see in your life.

The maths for this started to get quite insane and it took me a week to figure this out. You can get the code of my nightmares right here if you wish to view it or download it on my Github.

I think the thing I'm most proud about is every time I made a new version I managed to take it up a new level. I improved it and did things I had never made before each time.

So far I don't have any plans of keeping it going from here but who knows, maybe one day the 4th would be taking it 3D?.......to infinity and beyond