My first game, Rolling Rush, is a casual game where you steer your ball left and right and jump over the wide variety of obstacles you encounter on your mission to finish the level, or get the highest score with endless mode!
Rolling Rush can be played now in your browser! This version is not supported, and any minor bugs will not be fixed. Please still let me know (minibonzogames@gmail.com) and known bugs will be posted here.
Rolling Rush was the first mobile game I made, and my first proper experience of making a finished, published product with code. I'd made some smaller things with Scratch and later Python, but never anything this public before. I followed Brackeys' Unity tutorial to learn Unity and C#, and this game is effectively my attempt at adding more colour to the example game from that tutorial series. I really enjoyed designing and planning the different obstacles, learning how to spawn new obstacles automatically with randomness so I didn't have to manually design a level, and so the level is always slightly different every time the player plays. I also enjoyed the challenge of designing interesting UI Menus and an Appicon. Looking back now (in late 2025) I think they look terrible, but I'm really proud of how my skills have developed between then and my more recent games I released in 2023 and 2024, and this website now. I also really enjoyed designing my first App Icon. I faced many hurdles while trying to submit the game to the App Store, falling foul of all kind of vague and difficult to understand rules, while only being told what rule was broken, and not where in the app it broke. Eventually I overcame this (and similar problems on the Google Play Store) and Rolling Rush released for iOS and Android in January 2022.
The player controls a ball as it rolls towards different obstacles. The game ends when the player's ball hits an obstacle or falls off the sides of the platform. The player can steer left and right using the on-screen joystick or tap the screen above the joystick to jump over obstacles. The game can be played in 3 different modes: Play from Start, Play from Checkpoint and Endless Mode. The default mode, that every player plays when the open the game for the first time, is Play from Start. In Play from Start, the player has a score that counts up from 0 until the end of the game at score 500. Every 50 points the player unlocks a checkpoint, and different obstacles will start to appear, 0-50 has very basic obstacles, but as you get to 300, 400, 450 points, more complex obstacles that move, rotate and bounce will appear. In Play from Checkpoint, the player will start from their best checkpoint, so they can make more attempts at finishing the game by reaching Checkpoint 10. There is no score in this game, so players wanting to improve their score will always have to go through the easier stages at the start. Finally, Endless Mode lets players earn scores over 500. It has no stages or checkpoints, simply a random assortment of obstacles the whole way through until the player eventually hits one or falls off the sides.
My favourite part about making Rolling Rush was designing all of the obstacles and the generator code. I started with a “Normal” 2 wide 1 tall (2x1) obstacle, and then adapted it from there to make new ones, like “Wider” (5x1), “Moving” (a Normal obstacle moving left to right across the full width of the platform), “Taller” (2 wide, too tall to jump over), “Taller and Wider” (5 wide, too tall to jump over), “Taller and Moving”, “Full Width” (must be jumped over), “Full Width Rotating” (same width as the platform, rotates slowly) and finally “Bouncing” (self-explanatory). I used random number generation to change the distance between obstacles and the types of obstacles in different ways everytime the player plays the game, also saving me the effort of designing a level manually.
When not in Endless Mode, the player can unlock a new checkpoint every 50 points. After each checkpoint different obstacles rotate in and out, introducing more interesting and complex ones in exchange for some of the simpler options. When a player's run ends, they can choose to continue from the best checkpoint they achieved in that run, or from the main menu a player with Premium can start from their best ever checkpoint. In both these situations, the score doesn't count, so player's aiming for high scores will need to play from the start everytime, or play Endless Mode. A player's best checkpoint can be reset in Settings. The checkpoint system ends at 500 points, which is the maximum score in non-Endless, and reaching it is considered “finishing” the game, as you will have navigated all obstacles and progressed through all checkpoints.
After I released the game, I discovered that many higher-skilled players wanted to extend their highscore beyond the 500 maximum in non-Endless Mode, so I added Endless Mode. Endless Mode doesn't have the checkpoint system, and doesn't have different defined sections of specific obstacles, instead it is a free for all, any obstacle can be spawned at anytime, so the player will have to adapt to a wider range of levels that could be presented to them. Endless Mode is only available to players with Premium, an In-App Purchase I added.
