My jMonkey based game, “Nine Circles of Hell” is now available on
Steam
It uses jMonkeyCSG to construct the playing board, and jMonkeyLoris for its GUI interaction.
Many thanks to all the jMonkey contributors.
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Congratulations on your successful project!
Wow nice! A new fresh look on Marbles! I like the game idea and mechanics!
I would only make it a bit more energetic by adding a non-soothing soundtrack to the video on Steam and add more visual fx:
- Post processing like bloom, maybe depth of fiend when looking close at a marble, color curves adjustments
- More interesting and custom-drawn textures for the rings, not just some single texture drawn uniformly on it. A PBR texture with lines that help to discern the geometry and with some emissive elements would be great!
- More backgrounds than just the blackness. Something dynamic and moving on the background like stars, waterfall, fire and other stuff, would be great!
- Add visuals to the central hole and some animated effects, maybe light from it or something like that. Something must be happening to the marbles there.
- In the video show more of graphics features, the colors, the lights, different textures. And maybe put some more intense music.
And some other comments from my opinion:
- The buttons like “Back”, “Exit Game” and other are too small, playing at 1920x1080
- It’s not very intuitive which marble gets selected on pressing 1-2-3… maybe some hint would be great?
- As I was changing visual settings in the menu, nothing was changing on the game field so I was unable to understand how things would look unless I’ve confirmed the settings and started a new game.
- For some reason after I exit the game and then enter it again, it does not give me the menu, instead it starts generating a new level with the previous settings, so I have selected the smoothest holes the last time, exited the game, and then when I entered, I just had to watch how it went generating the maze again without any possibility to stop it. Maybe just showing the menu before taking any action would be great. I have found the button to “abort start” eventually but it was very non-intuitive.
- Also, can’t you cache the meshes? So not to generate them again each time. I must admit, the process of mesh generation looks awesome, but it would also be great to be able to do it much faster on subsequent times.
- You could add some more indication to the rings as to what they mean (the sins), either on the rings themselves or somewhere in the UI, showing what marble is where.
- An AI would be great. It also does not seem like it would be hard to write for this game.
Great indeed and congrats to you! 
I also think that there is potential that you may develop a bit further in this game, adding things like I’ve desribed above. 
To be honest, I liked the black background. Focuses the eye on the game.
Yeah, that too, you are right. Actually I like both possible variants but I can’t decide which one is better. All in all my mind also thinks about the Tabletop Simulator, if you look among games with similar flow.
The black background lets more focus and has some subliminal message here, too. Maybe its strict style better adds to the sublime and exalted atmosphere as well…
Thanks for all your interest and suggestions.
I did not start out looking to create a game at all. I began experimenting with jMonkey and wandered into CSG. While playing with combining shapes and watching the resulting physics, the possibility of a marble game arose. Since then, it has been a personal quest just to see if I could package it all up into something playable.
I have some on-going thoughts for version 2 and will start a list possibilities. Thanks again for your feedback.
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