I’ve been eyeing up Kongregate’s Unity support for a while now, though it’s not much of a business proposition at the moment. Unity games on Kongregate get 40 times fewer hits than Flash games. Still, I figure it’ll be an interesting experiment, and I’ll get to see what their ad rates are like.

I’m mindful that I’m exposing it to a gamer audience instead of a game dev audience, so I’ve made a limited attempt to polish it up, but I’ve hit my self-imposed deadline before I’m truly satisfied with it. In any case, I’ve been operating in a vacuum for too long, and it’s time to get some feedback.

Scoring Overhaul

I ran out of momentum prototyping the concept 2 years ago because I couldn’t see any interesting progression mechanics to pair up with basic challenge of trying to launch as many satellites as possible. That and there was a fairly boring dominant strategy where you can just queue up a lane of satellites in the same inclination.

In the new version, the objective is to link up pairs of ground stations. This provides an incentive to spread your satellites across different inclinations. Also, picking orbits to cover the most stations possible makes the game feel a bit more tactical.

The scoring is now a multiplication of two numbers, so linear improvements in the player’s skill grant quadratic improvements in the player’s score. This is nice because when you’ve been playing something for a while, it’s discouraging when the law of diminishing returns kicks in. I want to compensate for that by spreading out the high end of the score distribution. Yet another little thing I learned from Geometry Wars 2. That game is an education.

Other Changes

• I fixed some problems with the input that were hampering the player’s ability to place satellites over the ground precisely. Added an orbit prediction line too.
• UI redesign. All the crappy programmer art has been replaced with programmer art that’s somewhat less crappy. Yaay!
• The game ends now. It used to just run indefinitely, and save your highscore when you’d achieved a new personal best. This is the part I’m least sure about. You’re allowed only 5 collisions, so there’s a bit more tension. It feels more like Jenga now. That said, if I’d made an Undo function instead of a lives system, it’d be less frustrating.

While I’ve been writing this, the game’s been played more times at Kongregate than in the last year at Mostly Tigerproof. Heh.

I’ve been an enthusiastic proponent of paper prototyping, but I’m starting to see its limitations.

I’ve been playing The Void by Ice Pick Lodge. Ice Pick Lodge are the closest thing the game industry has to David Lynch. Aesthetically the game is remarkable, but I’m not going to address any of that.

In spite of an exhaustive tutorial, it’s actually even less accessible than their début game, Pathologic. It’s shorter and easier, but the gameplay is more difficult to grasp. I restarted the game four times after screwing the pooch so badly that the game became unwinnable. The game is just so abstract that it takes a while to understand the strategy.

The game establishes a jargon of it’s own from the beginning. Hearts, Colour, Nerva, Lympha are all abstract quantities or containers for abstract quantities. The colours crimson, amber, gold, emerald, azure, violet and silver all have special properties and uses. Before long, you start to feel like you’re playing Settlers of Catan.

If a game design is built wholly on paper, it’ll continue to reflect the limitations of board games even in its final form. The Void has all the hallmarks of being prototyped as a board game, then shoe-horned into a third person adventure game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has drawbacks:

• Board games can get away with game mechanics that are less intuitive than videogames. The fact that the player is carrying out rules manually guarantees that the mechanics will be tactically transparent. A videogame will need lots and lots of cumbersome UI to compensate.
• When designing a board game, it’s really tempting to leave the theme until later. You’ll tell yourself that if the game mechanics are fun, everything else will fall into place. Usually this results in a game that’s fun, but completely impossible to fit into a theme. A game without a theme is a very dry learning experience.

One of the biggest differences between Pathologic and The Void is that Pathologic started with familiar concepts (sickness, medicine, exhaustion, hunger), and then exposed the player to unfamiliar ones. The Void drops the unfamiliar concepts on the player all at once.

• If you’re designing a real-time game, there will be a distinct seam between the nitty gritty details of your simulated world and the strategy layer. It’s very difficult to integrate the two after designing the pieces in isolation.
• Board games tend to be a lot shorter than story driven videogames. To progress in The Void, you must plan at least 5 turns ahead. With the minutes-long turns of a board game, this forward planning gives a pleasant level of strategic depth. With the hour-long turns of this action-strategy hybrid, you’ll find yourself taking pages and pages of notes just to make sure you don’t spend something you were intending to save.

The sad thing is that I think the strategy layer would’ve made a fun board game, but it detracts from inhabiting the world and interacting with the characters. There’s no synergy between the two halves of the design.

I don’t know how much the awkward game mechanics are a deliberate part of the game’s message. The resource management aspect seems intended to provide irreversibility, so that the player’s decisions have weight and poignancy. Making these weighty decisions without understanding the consequences is part of the game’s theme. For less ambitious folks like myself, who are only shooting for an enjoyable game, it remains a counter example.

“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?