“Huh, what the hell is that?”

Mostly Tigerproof is a place for me to organise my game prototypes and other hobby projects.

It has all the prototypes I’ve posted here, but in web player form, so you don’t need to go through the rigmarole of installing them. Prototypes are by their nature are small games, so I’ve tried to make the playing them as quick and convenient as possible.

If it’s not quick and convenient, comment about it and I’ll fix it.

“Yeah, yeah, but when’s the next game due out?”

Don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ll try next. If I build a game based around abusing particle systems, it’ll be next week. If I start making a 4X with a stone-age tribal theme, it’ll be a while longer.

“What’s this got to do with tigers? Are you even slightly tigerproof?”

It’s not named after me! It’s named after Aunt Barbara. She’s not allowed in zoos any more.

Once upon a time (2001), I wrote an arena shooter called Mojotron as a hobby project. It was somewhat similar to Geometry Wars, except that Geometry Wars hadn’t been written yet (I was inspired by Llamatron instead). After I finished it, I worked on a sequel that would take that fast-paced combat and place it into a top-down maze exploration game. Like a combination of Gauntlet and Geometry Wars.

I took the Mojotron combat model, added scrolling and hooked up a random level generator that would produce networks of rooms (DungeonMaker, very cool).

Suddenly the game became noticeably less fun.

Monsters would shoot you from offscreen. Weapons that were appropriate for short ranges became frustrating to use against distant targets. Fast melee monsters that were easy to react to became very difficult if you were unknowingly scrolling toward them. In some situations, monsters were totally non-threatening, because they were too slow and too distant. The difficulty became very inconsistent.

The old single-screen arena had an important property: it put an upper limit on the distance to the opponents. The engagement distance varied from extremely short ranges (those claustrophobic moments when the player is hemmed in by monsters), up to the dimensions of the screen. By having a rough idea of the distance of the monsters, I was able to easily tune monster speeds so that they gave the player a challenging, but not excessive reaction time test. I was able to tune the speed of the player’s bullets so that they didn’t require the player to lead monsters by insane amounts.

When scrolling levels went in, all of that object speed tuning went out the window.

The most extreme examples of controlling engagement distance are the old 2D forced-scroll shmups (R-Type, 1942, Raptor and so on). Every time an enemy emerges into the screen a quick-draw gunfight starts between the player and the enemy. Neither gets to open fire before the other, the range and the timing are perfectly matched.

Imagine what a shmup would be like without this restriction. Bullets from all the enemies in the level would rain down on the player, and the player would spend most of their time killing enemies that aren’t even visible.

I could’ve applied that to my shooter, freeze everything that’s outside the screen but it seemed cheap, and at the time I didn’t understand what a central design decision it was.

In a modern 3D shooter, the situation is quite different because line-of-sight and facing direction play a key role in visibility. The level designer helps determine the engagement distance by placing walls.

You might imagine that this solves the problem, but amazingly, there was a 3D shooter called Chrome which managed to make the same mistakes my hobby game did. It had very open outdoor levels and no upper limit on how far enemy troops could see. This resulted in every confrontation turning into a sniper battle at extreme distance. This mightn’t have been a total disaster (Far Cry pulled it off), but the weapons frequently weren’t accurate enough to hit things at that range. In the end, it totally destroyed the gameplay.

Shooter designers need to decide on what the ideal distances are for combat. This influences the design of weapons, levels, cameras and movement speeds.

After one of many close calls during our tour buses’ overtaking manoeuvres, one of the other tourists joked that it was just like playing Grand Theft Auto. He has a point.

• No apparent speed limit.
• Right of way isn’t enforced.
• Nobody indicates.
• Police only get involved if they witness an actual collision.
• Even if the police do bust you, a donation can set you on your way again.

Seems to me like Asia is the natural setting for GTA. Why do Rockstar keep setting Grand Theft Auto in New York, Miami and LA lookalikes?

Think of the possibilities:

• Denser, more chaotic traffic, to keep things interesting. Perhaps it’d be best suited if it were a final level of the game?
• More varied interesting vehicles. I kept seeing tuktuks, rickshaws, huge tricycles with a big carrying tray between the back wheels (pickup tricycle? ute trike?), motorbikes converted into minibuses, tractors converted into minibuses, and so on. I even saw one guy cycling through the hutongs on a ute trike with its tray removed and a charcoal grill welded in its place. He was a mobile shish kebab stand!
• Pedestrians whose courage and stoicisim is matched only by their keen senses and finely tuned reaction times. Not to mention their sophisticated flocking behavour which allows them to make impromptu pedestrian crossings, much like a column of army ants will form a bridge out of their comrades.

1. An isometric 2D game
2. With only the platforming bits left in the game, and only the ones without timed traps
3. With a spartan, utilitarian visual style (every swing bar looks the same)
4. Where all the surfaces in a jumping sequence are visible from a nice fixed viewpoint

Would there be any challenge left in the gameplay?