Bradley Jones - Caloop

Caloop is a mathematical puzzle game. You place segments containing different operators and values around a wheel to form an equation, then spin it and see if your placement matches the target number. Made over two weeks with an artist and composer I'd worked with before, we wanted to see how far we could push polish given a slightly longer jam window and deliberately aimed for something clean and graphically distinctive.

Both of my team members were using tools I hadn't yet had experience with integrating into Unity, Spine for the 2D artwork and FMOD for audio. Picking both up mid-project was a good test of working with unfamiliar middleware under time pressure, and it's something I've drawn on in projects since.

The wheel can contain 3, 5, or 8 segments, so the rotation amount per step had to be calculated at runtime. The wheel also starts centred between two segments, meaning the first action requires half a step before the loop begins after which a while loop handles each remaining segment: spinning, stopping, applying the operator or ability, then continuing. An issue that surfaced during testing was that at consistent spin speed, levels with many actions had the player sitting and watching for too long. I added a simple scaling function that increases spin speed based on the number of pending actions, keeping the resolution of each puzzle snappy regardless of how complex the equation was.

A large part of the player's time is spent picking up and placing segments to build their equation, so the placement system needed to handle interactions intuitively. In an earlier version, clicking an occupied slot simply did nothing meaning players had to manually drop their held segment back to the hotbar and rearrange from there. I replaced this with a swap system: clicking an occupied slot now exchanges it with whatever the player is currently holding. Players can also discard a held segment by clicking outside the wheel entirely, snapping it back to the hotbar. These small changes made the interaction feel considerably less frustrating without adding any UI complexity.