Tom used to be a lawyer. Now he's a game designer. The two have more in common than you think.
Apologies for the late update! It’s been a week of coding, testing, and now more coding in response to the testing. đ
You’ll have to forgive me for needing to sleep, but I leave you with a shot of placeholder art:
Bonus points if you can tell how this boss fight works. đ
When you’re trying to make an approachable game, even a little bit of theming works wonders.
Sometimes you have a great-looking prototype that sells itself.
Sometimes . . . you’ve got this.
One of Playful‘s core ideas is a steady powering-up over the course of the game. The longer the hide-and-seek goes on, the easier it is for the knight to capture the dragon, and the more the dragon can do to avoid the knight. Since the player needs a final powerup to win, she has to keep the match going even as the stakes rise.
I was aware of one challenge that structure demanded I confront:
1. What should the powerups be? They need to feel powerful and rewarding, be interesting to work with, and yet not unbalance the game.
Frank Lantz brought another one to my attention in testing this evening:
2. How does the game feel without the powerups? In order to make the first powerup–a dash move–impressive, I had made the player really slow without it. While this had the intended effect, it made the early game miserable. Players understood very quickly what they were meant to do, but making it happen took an unnecessarily long time.
I’m grateful for the feedback; this is an issue I hadn’t thought to consider, but it’s vital to players’ first impressions of the game. I’ve now changed the first powerup to a smoke screen rather than a dash, which enabled me to give the dragon more speed at the outset. Hopefully that will improve the experience; of course, only more testing will tell!
There’ve been a couple of posts alluding to the current thesis prototype. Now it has a name:
Playful is a game about hide-and-seek. Two little kids, who happen to be a dragon and a knight, are chasing each other through a forest. Since the dragon has some natural advantages (most notably the ability to breathe fire), they agree that the dragon can’t go for the win until the knight has spotted the dragon twice. If the dragon can avoid getting tagged in those moments of risk, it’ll be possible to breathe fire on the knight and win the game.
One of my goals with Playful was to explore a form of conflict that isn’t within the violent norm of video games. We as humans compete all the time, but only a very small number of those forms of competition appear in games. I’ve been enjoying bringing kids’ makeshift, balanced-on-the-fly competitions into video gaming.
Playful is also meant to capture the notion of engaging with the risk posed by an opponent rather than controlling the opponent to negate risk; a few of my classmates summarize the idea as “honorable competition,” and I think that’s a good way to put it. Again, this is something we routinely do, giving one player small advantages or imposing limitations to ensure that a game is fun for everyone. Capturing that negotiation has been a lot of fun.
I’ve enjoyed working on Playful enough to want to polish it into something releasable, even if just as an interesting proof of concept. That process is ongoing now. Look forward to it in the coming weeks . . . .
The more I polish games, the more a lack of reasonable visual design bothers me, even in prototypes. Having a grey bar in place of some kind of skybox is rather a shame . . . .
Sorry for the late update–a business dinner ran into the evening.
Jay’s comment on the last post combines with offline polling to put the baby dragon theme in a dead heat with the ancient dragon concept. At this early prototype stage those two are mechanically identical, so playing as a dragon it is!
Of course, just over 24 hours into this new prototype you play as a Unity primitive carefully avoiding another Unity primitive. So it goes in the realm of rapid iteration. đ
Getting tired of vicious campaigning and elections that might change the fate of the post-war order? Take a break by voting on this low-stakes thesis prototype theme!
Which of these do you like best?
I would’ve liked to put up the latest thesis concept, but in testing it proved . . . unsatisfactory. As a result, I’ve scrapped it, with a few more lessons learned noted down.
Fortunately, in talking with a recent Game Center graduate I’ve come up with something new that I think has promise. It takes some of the things I’ve discovered about, for example, the “juice” thrill of powering up, and puts them into a context that I expect will be more workable. We’ll see how it goes.
The Law of Game Design 