Tag: LD48

Alamogordo: Post-mortem

I almost didn’t submit a game this time around. For some reason, I couldn’t get my creativity going. I thought that Beneath the Surface was such an excellent theme, too, with great potential. When they announced it, I started trying to think of a game that would happen underground, or under water. But all I could think of was the setting, not what you’d do there. My brain was being an enemy to me.

So I stayed up until about 6 AM Saturday morning, and still hadn’t thought of any good ideas. My best idea of the night came to me when the Neil Young song, “The Needle and the Damage Done” popped into my head, and I briefly considered making a game about heroin use and damaging the skin beneath the surface. If I wanted to do that right, I needed to make a chiptune cover of the song, and I still can’t do music properly. One day…

So, I put that idea aside, and then nothing else came to me. I slept in until around 11:30, and spent most of the afternoon sitting around, waiting for inspiration to hit me, but nothing happened.

I dicked around on the internet, reading stuff, and started reading all these articles about the New Mexico landfill dig, where they were trying to determine if the legends of massive amounts of unsold Atari merchandise being buried in the desert were really true.

Turns out, they were true!

I found the story fascinating, because why would people still care  that much that they’d dig around in a land fill trying to find that stuff. It’s not as though E.T. was a rare and valuable game. To me, the story wasn’t fascinating, it was people’s fascination with the story that was fascinating. It seemed to be getting a lot of coverage in the media.

I still didn’t have any ideas for what would be a good game, and by around 5 or 6, I had given up and resigned myself to not producing anything this time around, and felt pretty down about my failure to come up with any good ideas. I had a relaxing Saturday evening, went to bed, had a pretty normal Sunday, and then, around 7pm it occurred to me that the land fill dig was happening beneath the surface of New Mexico. Beneath the surface…

Beneath the surface…

Beneath the surface…

Beneath the surface…

neath the surface…

the surface…

surface…

urface…

face…

And I got this visual in my head of the pits in the E.T. video game, and connected that to the landfill, and immediately realized that there was a potential game in there.

Digging in the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill, in a pit from the E.T. video game, searching for the secret stash of E.T. videogames. I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, not really a challenging game, just an idle time waster that paid homage to the legend and the events of the weekend. I had less than 2 hours before Compo deadline, and knew I’d never make it, but this would need to be a Jam entry anyway, as I wanted to use graphics and audio sampled from the E.T. video game.

Unfortunately I was already on my way to spend the evening with friends, and I didn’t get home until close to 11pm. By 11:30, I had just gotten started, and I worked through the night until 6:30am, and which I had most of the level laid out and working. Movement and collisions were very buggy, but the game was basically playable by this point.

I took a power nap, worked Monday, and then cranked out bugfixes until I got everything working right. All told, the game took about 10 hours to build. My fastest development time ever. Howard Scott Warshaw took 5 weeks to make E.T., his fastest development time ever.

I used that time rather well, struggling only a little bit with the bug fixes, and all I really needed to fix those bugs was to step away from the project and return to it fresh — once I did that, it was fairly easy to redesign the code that handled movement and fix the problems I’d been having in the wee hours of the morning earlier in the day. Throughout the project there was very little re-work, almost nothing thrown away, and everything that I built was done in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a mess. The project code is actually pretty decent. Almost every LD48 that I’ve done so far, I’ve struggled with some stupid error in a feature that should be very basic and easy to do, and ends up sucking a lot of my time away from the project, but this time, I worked effectively from start to end. Only, I had just about 10 hours of work put into the project over the entire weekend.

The game itself, well there’s nothing much to it, but it does feel somewhat like one of those terrible shovelware titles that caused the Great Crash of ’83.

So, there it is, an homage to terrible games. Since that’s what it is, it somewhat excuses it from itself being a fairly terrible game. At least the programming is fairly decent, …beneath the surface.

Well, play it and see what you think.

Alamogordo

Ludum Dare 29

I didn’t complete an entry for Ludum Dare 29, and am a bit disappointed in myself. Although the theme “Beneath the surface” is an excellent theme suitable to all kinds of ideas, I struggled to come up with a concept that fit well with the theme. I thought about under ground, under water, and digging a bit, and I thought about skin, and metaphorical ideas, but these didn’t inspire a core play mechanic or goal, so I never really got to a playable game concept.

I need to figure out how to get myself into a creative mind on demand.

Update

Around 7pm, inspiration struck. I made a game after all. I made it in only about 6 hours, so it is not a very good game, but the idea was a fitting one, and I knew that I would be able to build it in under a day.

Alamogordo, my entry for the LD29 Jam, is based on the legend of the buried E.T. cartridges in Alamogordo, New Mexico, that were dug up over the weekend.

Game review: Javel-ein by Daniel Linssen

I loved Javel-ein when it was first released as a Ludum Dare 28 Jam entry. It’s been expanded into a “Full Game” — I put this in quotes because, other than perhaps a lack of background music, there wasn’t anything about the Jam entry that felt incomplete or less than “full” to me. TL;DR: it’s a great game, it’s free, and if you run Windows, you can play it.

Get Javel-ein.

Game Play

You’re a guy armed with a Javelin, jumping and running through a 2D platform world of caves and lava pits. There are dangerous creatures, which you’ll need to kill with your Javelin. Once all the creatures are destroyed, you need to find the door to take you to the next level. The twist is that you only get one Javelin, and you have to retrieve it each time you throw it, leaving you temporarily defenseless. (more…)

Fun plays from Ludum Dare 28

I don’t get to vote on LD28 games since I didn’t submit a game of my own, but I can still play them. Here are a few that I found worthwhile so far… these are in no particular order, other than the order I found them.

Asshole Ducks

Asshole Ducks

I love this take on the theme, “You Only Get One”. Gameplay has the feel of an Atari 2600 game, although the graphics are not done in that style — in the early 80’s game designers took a lot of inspiration from everyday life and would take demented inspiration from seemingly mundane activities such as crossing the street or sorting baggage. Asshole Ducks fits right into that type of game concept — you’re feeding ducks, and to make it fun you’ve made a little game out of it, the goal being to feed each duck exactly one piece of bread. But of course once a duck gets a taste for bread, it turns into an asshole and tries to eat all of it. It’s hilarious how well this reflects real-life duck behavior. Despite it being a bit of a one-trick pony, it’s quite fun to play, and pretty difficult. Graphics and sound are crude, but not essential to the success of the game, which is all about gameplay, humor, and that slice of life that is familiar to anyone who’s been to the park.

Javel-ein

javel-ein

Javel-ein is great. Full stop. One of the best games I’ve played in a long time, and one of the best LD48 games I’ve ever played. It’s amazing how well done it is, in all aspects, but particularly core gameplay and level design. It’s a fairly standard platformer, but with a twist. You move using the arrow keys or WASD, and you aim and throw a javelin with the mouse. You Only Get One, so once thrown, you have to retrieve it before you can throw again, leaving you defenseless in between shots. The enemies are just challenging enough, and you have to kill all of them before you can activate the gateway to advance to the next level. You have to stay alive, can’t get hit once or touch lava, and there are also optional bonus pickups scattered throughout the levels for added challenge. Graphics are quite good for the style, using an amazing 16-color palette. The only weak point is the sound effects, which are typical bfxr blandness, but fill the intended purpose adequately. Early levels aren’t terribly challenging, but it ramps up pretty quickly, and the “boss” at the end of the enhanced edition is one of the best, most satisfying videogame battles I’ve won in a long, long time, overcome only by mastery over the controls AND a shrewd strategy that I discovered after dozens of attempts.

A Ronin Heart

A Ronin Heart

Just as impressive as Javel-ein, but a bit less innovative in terms of play mechanics; in this action platformer, your “only get one” thing is your life — take one hit and your artificial heart is cut loose, and you have a few seconds to try to grab it before you die. Since this only comes into play briefly, when you get hit, it doesn’t open up a lot of potential for interesting play, but it’s every bit as well polished as Javel-ein. A strong art style evokes Edo period Japan, the pixel samurai animation is rendered masterfully.

I Can Haz One?

I Can Haz One?

Even though this is a very simple game and kindof stupid, I still like it. The cat is cute, the music is cute, and it is fun to see all teh thingz u can hazzing. Joo r a cat, things fall from teh skyez, an joo haz to haz only one thingz. Try to haz teh moast raer thingz to get moar pointz.

You Only Get One Chance To Save Xmas

youonlygetonechancetosavexmas


Simple, but fun. You run around a shopping mall, trying to find the right colored gift for each person on your list before time expires. Shove other shoppers out of your way if you want to. The minor-chord variant on “Jingle Bells” is fitting. This could really be a fun holiday satire title if developed a bit more — I think there should be a Boss Santa or something that you have to fight at the end.

Ninja Kun’s Final Exam

ninja_kun

This difficult platformer provides challenge through stealth puzzles. You must evade the samurai and get to the door. The samurai are very difficult to defeat if they are alert to your presence, so your best bet is to sneak around them with your stealth, or to hit them with a shuriken while they are still unaware. You can use a rope to climb to the ceiling and hang, which makes for an interesting alternative to jumping, which you also can do. The graphics are well done, cute pixel art, similar in style to the original GameBoy. The major downside is the controls: using the left/right arrow keys to run, up/down arrows to use the rope, space to jump, and the number 1 key to shoot a star makes for a very awkward control layout. Also, if you make any mistakes, you start all over from the very beginning — I really wish the doors served as save points.

1111 pt 1

1111pt1

This literal take on the “You only get one” theme is brilliant. Flying around in space, shooting numbers >1, breaking them down to 1’s, collecting the 1’s to gain points to power up and face ever larger numbers.

The game is very easy, there’s no real challenge here, just button mash your way to victory. But it’s fun to see how your ship changes as you level up, and the interesting forms the higher numbers take.

 That One Coin

thatonecoin

This is a simple platformer, but it comes with a twist. You can win simply by collecting ONE coin. So the challenge becomes how far can you go WITHOUT collecing a coin? It’s like a very difficult platformer where one mistake kills you, but instead of ending the game through death, it ends it through “rewarding” you. It’s an innovative gameplay idea that turns the game on its head. Core gameplay is not terribly sophisticated — I’ve played many run and jump games that were done better — but the music and the sarcastic instruction text make it a fun play.

 One Shot

One Shot

Tiny pixel art stealth platformer where you get one bullet per level to get past multiple lethal sentries. There are also obstacles that will kill you, most of which you’ll discover inadvertently. This game is seriously hard, and will take a determined player a long time to beat all 11 levels. The developer wasn’t able to complete the game by deadline, but I hope they finish the remaining four levels originally intended.

Natural Sheep Care

natural_sheep_care

If you like grinding, then Natural Sheep Care is the game for you. I don’t like grinding, but I have to admit that I found this to be a captivating and well-realized game. It was far too difficult for my patience, but I really felt drawn to the game world, and wanted to find out what would happen if I could win enough to make it through the portal. The difficulty stems from the carefully balanced economy that demands frugality and perfection, as well as intelligent power-up tree management, and the controls, which includes a novel aiming system that demands pinpoint timing and execution.

YouTube reviewer RockLeeSmile is much better than I was at the game, and managed to play through in his video:

The game consists only of one level, and the reward payoff is anticlimactic, but the game shows a lot of promise if the story elements were expanded and allowed a sense of journey to develop.

 One Take

One Take

One of the most original games I’ve ever played, you’re a camera operator shooting a movie. You have to get the shot perfect in a single take — you only get one. Shoot three different movie scenes. Your score is based on how well you capture a sequence of moments that happen during the scene. If you hit your marks and follow the Director’s instructions, your movie will receive a good rating.

Blomster

Blomster

A nonviolent puzzle platformer, Blomster is a well-polished hike through a dark cave to hunt for flowers. The challenge is to figure out how to get to the exit gateway in each cave. You find a glowing ball that lights up when you are carrying it, and which has the power to make some platforms become solid or immaterial. You need to be clever in order to get the platforms to become solid when you need them to be, so you can walk on them and move through the level. The physics, lighting, controls, and camera are fantastic. It’s a fairly short play, and more relaxing than challenging, but quite enjoyable.

Gearing up for Ludum Dare 28

I’m getting myself ready for LD48-28, deciding my general approach to take to this project. I like to do this ahead of time so I can get certain design considerations of the way, impose creative constraints, and focus on a particular goal within the scope of my project, independent of the theme.

Tools

IDE

GameMaker Studio

As usual, I’ll be making use of GameMaker Studio for my development, and probably only targeting Windows .exe build for the initial release, with a possible HTML5 build eventually if feasible.

I don’t have any particular aim this time around to use any specific features of GameMaker, we’ll leave that up to the theme and game concept to drive those decisions this time.

Graphics

Paint.NET, and Pickle

I’ve given the new Pickle 2.0 a try and while it’s no longer free/donationware, I do think that I at least like it for its onion skin feature that enables easier animations. I can see a lot of potential improvement for Pickle, and to that end I’ve written up a number of feature requests and enhancements and sent them along to the developer. I’ll be really excited if any of them get picked up and implemented.

I am going to use my pixel art minimalism technique, and also I intend to use a tightly constrained color palette. Not sure yet how few colors I want, but maybe a 4-color monochrome palette a la classic GameBoy would be fun. In any case, I’ll be making an effort to use only the smallest number of colors necessary, and paying close attention to how color works in the graphics I develop. I am going to see if Paletton can help me make better palette selections, and if I can apply what I learned from this coloring tutorial that I recently came across thanks to Joe Peacock’s recommendation.

Audio

Bfxr

Bfxr, of course, for sound effects. Maybe also some recorded audio samples for stuff that I can’t do well in bfxr.

Famitracker (maybe)

It’s probably still ambitious for me to try to pick up and learn Famitracker in a weekend and use it to good effect. I’ve been putting off learning it, though, and I want to have some kind of bgm in my game. Whether I end up using it or not in my LD project, I’ll be making an effort over the next few months to figure it out and put together some compositions with it.

Ludum Dare 25 Rankings

I was pretty pleased with how Bad Puppy turned out, so I hoped that my placement in the rankings would be higher this time than my previous entries. I did see a modest improvement in my scores overall.

Bad Puppy LD25 Ratings

Ranking Category Score (out of 5)
Coolness 100%
#70 Humor 3.55
#274 Fun 3.04
#312 Audio 2.57
#426 Innovation 2.71
#450 Theme 3.00
#490 Overall 2.76
#526 Mood 2.47
#636 Graphics 2.18

The 70th place (out of 902 Compo entries) in Humor is the best ranking I’ve had in any category in an LD compo game so far. So hey, that’s something. I’m in the top 10% in the Humor category.

Comparing to my previous LD games, here’s how I did:

Category LD23 LD24 LD25
Coolness 56% 100% 100%
Overall 2.76 2.82 2.76
Innovation 3.41 2.58 2.71
Fun 2.62 2.58 3.04
Theme 3.34 3.20 3.00
Graphics 2.75 2.22 2.18
Audio 2.07 2.60 2.57
Humor 2.07 1.86 3.55
Mood 2.68 2.70 2.47

I’m a little surprised that I didn’t do better in the Graphics category this time around, since I actually had animated sprites in this game for the first time. And they were pretty cute, I thought, if primitive. But I am pleased to see marked improvement in Humor and Fun, which were the things I focused on when I made Bad Puppy.

Bad Puppy Design Analysis: The Bad

Recently, I wrote up a design analysis of my game for Ludum Dare 25, Bad Puppy. Mostly, I had positive things to say about what worked about the game design. Having continued to develop the game since then, and having played many more hours in testing and for fun, I’ve noticed some flaws in the design, too, so I feel like talking about them.

Difficulty depends on display size

I did all of my game development on a 1680×1050 screen. When I developed the game, I wanted it to play in fullscreen mode, with the room scaling up or down to fill the display. I coded a routine that dynamically sized the “room” to the exact size of the display. But, although the room changes size, the player and enemies do not. Since they do not scale up or down, this means that on a larger screen, the player has much more room to run around and avoid the enemies, which makes the game much easier; conversely, on a smaller display, the game is much more difficult. I felt like the game was about “just right” at 1680×1050, which means that above that size it’s probably too easy, and below, too hard.

This also means that high scores are not directly comparable on different systems. I will have to keep this in mind when I eventually implement the online highscore system. Either I’ll have to standardize the room size, which involves its own trade-offs, or I’ll have to create different scoring categories for each screen resolution, and then do some order-by stuff with the query that displays the rankings, which fragments the player community.

Another shortcoming, on the Instructions screen, the text cuts off at the bottom if the resolution is smaller than 1680×1050. I need to fix this, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Safe Spots

Safe spots are places in a game where it is impossible or dramatically harder to get hurt. Many games, particularly in the NES era, featured “safe spots” as a kind of strategic place where you could safely attack certain enemies, especially bosses. Safe spots can ruin gameplay if they make the game too easy. The worst offenders are games where you can just sit in one place, and hold down the attack button, and win. There is no difficulty to such a game, beyond finding the safe spot in the first place. Many games have temporary safe spots, which are better, because they give the player a short-term advantage that they can exploit, but they still have to remain actively engaged in order to prevail, and usually learn a pattern, or a behavioral trick that they can use to manipulate the AI to make the enemy do something stupid, like get stuck or attack in a way that always misses.

Bad Puppy does not have a static safe spot where you are always safe, but it does have a certain amount of exploitable AI behavior that gives rise to a dynamic safe spot. Because of the way I constructed the hitbox for the AI petters, if you walk upward you can avoid taking “damage” most of the time, as long as you can avoid walking into the bottom of a petter who is above you. The AI will continuously home in on you, so you always have to keep moving, but if you can run around the crowd of petters, they get herded into a bunch, and if you then stay above them, escaping through the top of the room when necessary, it’s pretty easy to avoid petting.

A skillful player should be able to discover effective tactics and use them in order to play for a better score. As a designer, I do want there to be ways to play that the players can discover through trial and error that will lead to improved scores. Ideally, though, the gameplay should be rich enough that there are a variety of valid approaches, and not one dominant strategy that breaks the game.

One of the weaknesses of Bad Puppy is that the gameplay is a bit shallow in this regard. I noticed this early on, so my very first post-compo improvement was to add a bonus pickup system. In retrospect, it was a pretty glaring omission from the original design. I wanted a retro style, and bonus pickups are a very common trope in retro arcade style games. Even though picking up the bonus items is completely optional, it still seems to dramatically change the way people play the game. People want to grab the bonuses, and are willing to take risks to get them, even though all they get is points, and even though it is safer to just concentrate on avoiding people and herding them.

Still, a frequent suggestion that I’ve received from players is to add additional mechanics to the game. They want the puppy to bite, or pee, or do something else besides just running and barking. So while the bonus pickups definitely added some depth, I’m not sure that they are enough by themselves.

What next?

All the other post-compo features that I’ve added so far have been cosmetic enhancements — adding a female petter, varying the skin color and clothes colors. They help make the game less visually monotonous and add flavor. I haven’t added any new gameplay features since adding the bonus system because I’m not yet sure from a gameplay standpoint what the game needs. The game feels a bit one-dimensional, but, aside from that, what’s there feels pretty balanced and fun, so I’m not sure what I should add next, or how it could integrate to the whole that is there already.

One of my goals with the You Are The Villain theme was to create a harmless villain, because I just couldn’t stomach making a game about a being a villain on the same day of the Sandy Hook shooting. And my original concept was to make the puppy a reincarnation of Hitler, who was weak and powerless, all bark and no bite. I liked the idea of a powerless Hitler. I didn’t want to make the puppy so bad that he could actually hurt people, and I’m not clear how either a pee or a bite mechanic would add depth to gameplay. The existing gameplay, while shallow, is pretty solid, and new features should not feel “tacked on” or ruin the balance of existing play mechanics.

When adding gameplay features, I think it’s important to be gameplay-centric in your thinking. The suggestions I’ve received, I think, have been character-centric; the feedback feels like it came from asking the question “What else do bad puppies do?” In my opinion, merely adding features to the puppy to give it more attributes of a real-life puppy would not be good for gameplay. Better, in my opinion would be to make observations like, “I’m running away all the time. I find myself wishing I could get the upper hand.”

One thing that could lead to deeper gameplay would be a mechanism that resulted in some sense of advancement. It would need to be necessary — something the player has to do in order to keep playing, and that gives the player a secondary goal and sets up internal conflict between barking/running and whatever the secondary goal is. I plan to explore this idea and see what I can come up with.

Bad Puppy: Design Analysis

So, last weekend I made Bad Puppy for Ludum Dare 25. I didn’t realize it as I was making it, but it seems that I’ve come up with a game that is really pretty fun. I’ve gotten many compliments from people who’ve tried it, and the more I’ve played it, the more it’s grown on me.

I think it’s worth analyzing the game to identify factors that contributed to it being fun.

Mood/Humor

Bad Puppy is cute. Everyone loves puppies, they are irresistible. So this makes the game inherently enjoyable — if the puppy works. I think I did a good job with making the puppy cute enough, using just a simple animation and some basic sound effects. The running and wagging animations are winners. 

One of my most frequent feedbacks has been that the “graphics could use a little polish” — I agree. But I also don’t want to lose the charm of the simple/crude 8-bit pixel art aesthetic. I think the style works for the game, but it could be enhanced by more variety. That’s why I added an enhancement to make the sweater color random. I’m also planning on doing something similar to vary the skin tone of the person, and maybe create a selection of hair styles. There will definitely be a female person too, as soon as I’m able to create her.

The graphics for the pickup bonus items are rather crude, and I’d like to improve them as well. I’ll probably try something subtle, like adding shading and shadow to them, and see whether that works.

I’ve also thought about doing something with the drab grey background color, but I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with that yet.

The barking sounds, panting, and “good boy!” are also cute. I just recorded myself barking and manipulated the sample a bit in Audacity to make it sound 8-bit. Something about the lo-fi, crude aesthetic seems to enhance the cuteness.

Gameplay

Bad Puppy is a very simple game. It is also a relatively fast game (in terms of short play times). A typical play usually doesn’t last more than a minute or two. Short play makes the game enjoyable to repeat. 

I made the game short by increasing the difficulty, and by providing no means of regaining lost meanness, or gain extra lives. This means the game must inevitably end, and a play is only as long as the player is able to make it with their skill. When you play a short game and the length of play is determined by skill alone, it tends to make you want to play again, because you just know you can do better the next time.

Controls

The controls are very simple. You run around, and bark. The controls are simple enough that they could be done with a 1-button Atari joystick. The game doesn’t need anything more than this.

Despite being simple from the user input standpoint, the motion that is governed by the controls have a little bit of polish in them. First, you don’t keep moving if you release the controls, but you also don’t stop immediately, either. Rather, if you are not pressing an up/down control, your speed in the y-axis decelerates gradually until it reaches 0; and the same for left/right and the x-axis speed. This gives the puppy a slightly “slippery” feel, makes the motion feel like a more natural curve, rather than orthoganal directions, and “de-diagonalizes” the motion so that the only way you move diagonally is if you are pressing in both the x and y axis simultaneously. It is a motion mechanic which feels natural as well as puppy-like.

Strategy

The play mechanics and strategy are something I’m proud of. I can’t say I designed this from an ingenious flash of insight, but the way it came together, it felt very natural and like things were coming together in a way that felt right, and following my instincts to do the least complicated thing that seemed necessary worked well.

With the gameplay, there are a few things that stand in tension against each other, which result in a kind of dynamic equilibrium that makes the game fun.

  1. To bark at someone, you have to be close to them. You don’t get points for barking at someone who is too far away, you have to be a certain distance away from them or nearer. This means that you can’t be just anywhere in the room, and have to move in order to be in a good position to bark for optimal points. It also means that you have to put yourself at risk, because…
  2. When a walking person gets too near to you, they start to chase you. They don’t simply walk a predetermined course, unresponsive to your position. This creates a sense of adversary, as opposed to uncaring/ambivalent people who just walk and don’t react to your presence. It makes the game more interactive.
  3. Chasers give up if you get too far away from them, and go back to horizontal walking. This gives you additional incentive to run from them. But it can also influence the player to not run too far away from them, either, if you are trying to lead/herd them. Keeping you closer to the people makes the game riskier, and keeps the player on their toes more.
  4. You are faster than the people, which is good because if you weren’t, the game would end too quickly. You need to be able to get away. Puppies running faster than people is natural and feels right, and is in that sense realistic.
  5. The room wraps. You can take advantage of this to escape at the edge of the screen, rather than get boxed in by the edges of the room. 
  6. People will wrap horizontally, but due to the way the homing AI works, someone chasing you will “lose” you if you wrap off the edge of the screen, effectively giving up chase. However “normal” walkers who are not in pursuit of you will continue to move in the direction they are heading in, and wrap. Since there’s no visual way to differentiate between these two modes, it makes the enemy AI difficult to predict, and forces the player to react rather than anticipate.
  7. People do *not* wrap vertically, and mostly do not move in a vertical direction unless they are in pursuit mode. After playing a while, a player can pick up on this and use it as a strategy to evade a group of people when they are surrounded.
  8. To bark at someone, you need to be facing them — barking does not increase your score if you are facing away from the person, even if you are close enough to bark at them. This means a strategy of always running away while barking will not work; you need to repeatedly turn around and bark toward your pursuers. Coincidentally, this is very puppy-like behavior, running away and then turning around and running back, but trying to stay out of reach.
  9. An effective strategy is to try to “herd” the people by taking advantage of their pursuit response, in order to get them to bunch up. When bunched up, there is a lot of room to run around and avoid petting. And you can bark at the entire herd, which multiplies the points you get per bark. Having an effective strategy available to the player which they can discover through play makes the game more fun, because it rewards them for playing and making the discovery, and gives them a tactic through which they can feel they have achieved mastery over the game.
  10. To effectively counter the herding strategy, and prevent people from bunching up too much, I added an AI behavior, whereby a person who has been barked at too many times (which is randomly variable) will run away. Run away mode is mostly identical to walking mode, except that the direction is always away from the player, and the trigger distances to return to normal walking mode puts them a far enough distance from the player that they will not immediately revert to pursuit mode. The result of all this is that after a short time of successful herd-barking, the tactic’s reward diminishes as people start running away, and the risk increases because the retreating people spreading out makes the room more crowded, and it becomes harder for the player to avoid petting.
  11. The original version of the game lacked bonus pickup items. I realized quickly that with the player having only one thing to do, the game was a bit too one-dimensional and did not offer enough of a replay value. Adding the bonus pickups gives the player a secondary objective of collecting the bonuses.While this is completely optional, the game really seems transformed by presenting the player with temptation and giving them something else to do. Without the bonuses, a player can focus completely on avoiding petting, and will tend to last longer. With bonuses, there’s just enough temptation to try to pick them up that they become willing to take risks which will result in them getting petted a little bit, and the attrition wears the player down over time, reducing average play time. A clever player might see through this and decide that the way to get the highest score is to ignore the bonuses and focus on defensive play, trying to score only through barking, and picking up bonuses only accidentally. This might well be a better long-term strategy, but the value of the bonus items increases dramatically over time, which puts the value of going after them at a level where it seems worthwhile if you’re trying for a high score.

A few players have suggested adding something more to the gameplay, but I’m not sure what changes might improve on this without disrupting the dynamics of the core mechanic. I’ve thought of a few things, and will be experimenting with them in time. But sometimes knowing when something is complete and when not to add more is where the real design talent is.

I think there are many opportunities to polish what I’ve built so far without touching gameplay — an online scoreboard feature would be a great way to enhance the game and get people playing for global bragging rights, for example.

I’m interested in feedback, so if you’ve played the game and have something to say, please drop me a comment below or at the LD submission page, or tweet at me.

LD48 24: Evolution. Karyote alpha

It’s not much at all yet, but I have an alpha build of my entry for Ludum Dare 24: Evolution up and running in HTML5.

Karyote

It’s not really playable yet, at the moment I’m just working out some motion and object prototypes. Graphics are all placeholders. You’re always in the center. Move with the arrow keys. Left/Right turns, Up moves forward.

Somehow, I’m doing another game with a microorganism theme. LD#23 was Bactarium, LD#24 will be called Karyote. You control a single celled organism that mutates as you play.

I still need to figure out what exactly you’re doing in the game, but I have some ideas that I haven’t implemented yet, so I’m a little further along than it looks as far as the concept goes. I’m designing as I go, mainly this is design by fiddling around. That’s a dangerous way to go on any project, but when I don’t have much of an idea to begin with, I find it’s one of the most reliable ways of getting me going. Hopefully I’ve learned enough lessons from previous projects to avoid messing up the code architecture, so debugging and feature changes don’t turn into a nightmare toward deadline.