Archive for the 'Postmortems' Category

The games that didn’t make it Part 1: Rain

Published at August 31, 2007 in The games that didn't make it and Postmortems. 1 Comment

rain game screenshotWhen you make games the way I do, using quick prototypes to test out ideas, it a natural consequence that not all of them work out. Some turn out great (Hovercrafty, dingding and even isotope2) some do become games, original, but maybe not all that good in the long run (Moonlumber and to some extent flashbombs). Then there’s the rest, the ones that don’t even make it into a complete game. It may be for a multitude of reasons, but most often it’s because they’re not fun enough.

I have a couple of these lying around, and I figured I might aswell write a bit about them. The first one is “rain”. Most my games get a short name like that while I make them, Eater of Worlds was called slingshot, flashbombs was called bounce and dingding was called grid.

This uses the Boids style simulation from Popeatron to make a cloud, it looks really nice, but with one drawback. It’s horribly slow.I could probably speed it up quite a lot using stuff I’ve learned since then, but would still be a waste of processing power to do the cloud like that.

It does controls quite nice, the cloudlike feel is there when you’re moving it about. This is one of those things that worked as a toy, but where I had real trouble finding the gameplay.

I tried playing around with mouse gestures since I didn’t want to get keyboard controls in there, the mouse is so much nicer. So, by “massaging” the cloud you can make it rain, and if you move the mouse a bit faster in one direction you’ll make a lightning bolt.

And that’s about it. I never found a way to make it into a game without making it overly complicated. Instead I moved on to make Eater of Worlds.

The game is after the break.
Continue reading ‘The games that didn’t make it Part 1: Rain’

Conclusion

Published at October 9, 2006 in Postmortems. 1 Comment

This has been five intense weeks, I really feel that I’ve leant more about games than I did the entire first year on my education. Making games this way is a really great way to get lots of experience, fast. I’m not sure I’d do it for ten weeks, I feel pretty spent game design wise. But after I’ve had a few weeks to get my brain back on track again I’d really like to do the same thing again.
One of the greatest challenges with this project were the keywords, more often that not I found myself basing the game on one of the words and sort of cheating in the second (or just ignoring it), this was really against the rules I set in the beginning. But then again, my main goal was to make games that were fun to play, not make games heavily tied to keywords. If I’d do it again I think I’d choose a broader theme like “water” and then do a bunch of variations on that. One good thing with the keyword rules I used is that you can’t really start with the next game until you’re supposed to. This keeps you focused on the game at hand.

Final Advice

I summed up my experiences from this project in a few points. Maybe they can help someone else.

Do the important stuff first and do the fun stuff as a “break” of sorts.
For me this meant to make a toy that tested the gameplay as fast as possible, and then, when that got tedious I did some graphics. It’s pretty easy to tell which games were the most fun to make, they have the worst graphics.

Take the middle route, there’s fast and there’s good. Make it both.
It’s a classic programmers thing to make “good reusable code”, screw that. If it gets the job done it’s the code for you. Of course there’s no point in coding the whole game like crap either, then you’ll be screwed when you need to change stuff. The trick here is obviously to find the middle route, modular but fast to write. It’s also a good idea to look for examples or code snippets that do what you want to do, we’re prototyping here so I say steal and pillage code as much as you like, as long as you give credit where it’s due.

Don’t be afraid to change your game if it isn’t fun.
I spent ages trying to make Popeatron amusing when what I really would have needed to do was to scrap the concept and rethink it entirely. A bit like I did with Isotope. That was also a game that suffered from “unfunniness” but, a rethink of the rules and it turned into something amusing.

Emergence is your friend. When the game makes it’s own content, you won’t have to.
There’s a reason why I’ve used the elastic ropes in half of the games i made. When you make a game in three days you spend the first day coming up with the idea, the second day is making the basic mechanic and the third day is making a game out of it. There’s just no time to make levels.

Final thoughts

I’d recommend this to anyone who claims to be the least bit into designing games, most of my classmates however doesn’t have the programming experience to do it. But I say learn. Spend a few weeks getting to know some way to make games (I’d recommend Flash, over say C++, atleast for prototyping), then go for it on a spree like this.

Swallows postmortem

Published at October 8, 2006 in Postmortems. 0 Comments

swallowsWords: Bird, Pendulum.

Description: When I was looking around for words for this game I instantly knew what to do. Swallows carrying coconuts. I got started on a first prototype, but about midday on the second day it sort of collapsed on itself. There was some sort of bug in the physics that made it behave very weird. I couldn’t sort it out and had to redo the whole thing from the beginning. Which was just as well, the whole thing was a lot better the second time around.

What went right: I really like the theme of the game. The swallows behave nicely and it looks very springy and nice.

What went wrong: Once again I wasn’t entirely sure what the actual gameplay mechanic would be when i started, I think this shows in the final product. As it is now I think the game is too hard, it just gets a bit frustrating not being able to affect the birds directly. I tried allowing the player to attach multiple ropes to one swallow, but then it became too easy instead. The game might benefit from fewer swallows but more control, and then making the levels a bit more like labyrinths.

Conclusion: This game could really have been a second Popeatron, I didn’t really know where I was going with the gameplay until a bit too late. It did however turn out as a pretty neat game in the end.