The Fine Spline Sine Lines

One night before bed I was thinking about different movement systems I could develop. Then I started thinking about Sines and Cosines and how if you put an increasing angle into the Cosine function and Sine function the position will move in a circle. Kinda like this:

Now if we decide to just have an object take that position we will have that

exact object moving in a 1 unit circle. What if we could choose the angle? What if where ever the mouse was, relative to the center of the screen, that's where the angle would be calculated from? So we end up being able to control where the circle is just based on where our mouse is.

Now that we have an object moving around in a circle depending on where our mouse position is, let's instead of controlling the position, control the velocity of the object. Now we almost have a joystick of sorts.

Now that in itself isn't a very interesting idea. I've just made a visualization for moving an object when I can just use the mouse without needing the little joystick to see if the object is moving. Let's visualizing movement with two different waves to determine movement instead of the joystick. So we'll have one wave on the left that controls the up and down velocity and another wave down bellow that controls left and right velocity. Well if I just clean it up a bit we have The Fine Spline Sine Lines, a puzzle like dexterity game focused on unique movement.

Just introducing a couple collectibles and pickups that change the waves around and we've got a pretty interesting game. I prototyped this about 2 years ago and it actually served as inspiration for a game I developed in school called Sweet Cemetery. During the early times of Sweet Cemetery we were just gonna expand on this game with a graveyard theme. The teachers and testers I had go through the current version in the past didn't really enjoyed it all that much, so it wasn't further developed and we ditched the idea for a different movement system. This still stands as a favorite prototype for me because of all the new mechanics and issues I ran into while creating this. For now though it'll just sit on the back burner. Those early tests didn't really reveal people liking this mechanic all that much.