Zorb.io Remastered

We are exited to announce Zorbio Remastered! This is the largest set of updates that we’ve made to the game since we launched 1 year ago. Highlights include new original sound track composed especially for Zorbio, revamped UI and logo, new skins, natural AI curve paths, steering helper, food chains, and more!

Play Zorbio now, or read on about the updates.

• New Features
  • Original Sound Track
  • New Logo and Revamped UI
  • New Skins
  • Natural AI Curve Paths
  • Steering Helper
  • Food Chains
  • Daily Leaderboard
• Fixes
  • CPU Optimizations
• Thank you! <3

New Features

Original Sound Track

We had the great privilage to work with V E U S K E M I N I 雄 志 in Ludum Dare 38 on Pity About Earth. So, we were super exited when he sent us the pictures below of progress shots for an original sound track he was working on for Zorbio! He has a great talent for composing music to fit the game, and we think he done just that with the new Zorbio OST. Zorbio use to have no music at all and it really needed this to make it a complete game. Try it with headphones for the best experience!

New Logo and Revamped UI

We went down a lot of different paths in our quest for a new logo. The theme we aimed for was glowy neon with a hint of the 80’s.

Roughly twenty iterations later, here is the new Zorbio logo.

The live in-game logo is animated.

New Skins

It’s been to long since we added new skins. Part of the reason we’ve not added more skins is that until now adding a new skin wasn’t easy. But now we’ve improved our skin system so that we can add a lot more skins in the future. And what better to kick off Remastered than with a set of planet based skins! Become your favorite planet and dominate the other Zorbs! With the skins we wanted to go for a more artistic and cartoony feel, rather than super relealistic. You’ll notice that some prominent planets and celestials are missing from this planet line up, watch for these in the future!

Natural AI Curve Paths

Zorbio is populated with some AI spheres to make the world more interesting. These AIs use to pick a random point fly to it in a straight line, then pick a new point, and instantly change directions and fly straight to that point. This made for very un-interesting zig-zag path pattern. In Remastered we’ve given the AI spheres much more natural curving and varying paths. They fly so naturally now that they are almost indistinguishable from human players.

Here is a close up of how the AI spheres move along their path. Here they are all going the same direction as an example, in game they change direction and no AI sphere flies on the same curve. Also there is an Easter Egg hidden in this video, can you spot it? And can you figure out how to unlock it? It’s in the game right now!

This screenshot shows their randomized paths:

Here is a development screenshot of when I was testing out different increasing scale of the same knot curves and it made an interesting shape:

Steering Helper

Experienced players have mastered Zorbio’s steering system, but it remains a difficult learning curve for new players. The cornerstone of the steering system is centering your mouse to fly straight. To help teach that, the game will detect when a new players’ steering patterns are erratic and suggest they center the mouse.

In addition, the game has a new custom cursor which dynamically rotates to indicate the direction and sharpness of a players’ steering.

Food Chains

For the entirety of Zorbio’s existence, food particles have been randomly placed throughout the game world. This encouraged players to take a somewhat haphazard flight path. Players would eat a piece of food, then fly to the whichever piece of food appeared closest, then repeat ad nauseum. Now, a new gameplay pattern has arrived: food chains.

Piggybacking on the natural AI paths above, food chains are sequenced of food organized into winding chains. Eating an entire chain will earn you a lot of size, but it will challenge your steering skills. And beware, other players can also see the chain, so they’ll know where you’re headed!

Daily Leaderboard

Zorbio has an persistent Leaderboard, but before Remastered it was hidden away. We thought it would be fun to put the daily high scores right on the front page for everyone to see your greatness! Can you get the daily top score?

Fixes

Remastered also includes many bug fixes, and performance enhancments.

CPU Optimizations

Shortly after releasing Zorbio Remastered to production we noticed our servers CPU was pegged at over 100% this definitely was a problem! So we did some node.js CPU profiling and were able to optimize the performance to better than before Remastered was released. This means our servers can handle more players than before and less lag for you!

Thank you! <3

If you’ve read this far thank you! We are so grateful to all of our players. This <3 is for you!

Play Zorb.io