Horse takes on Supanova

While over the Easter week I didn't make as much progress on the code base for Horse as I would have liked, I did, over the weekend, attend the hallowed halls of Brisbane's original nerdfest, Supanova.

Ostensibly this was for the purpose of promoting QCA and recruiting future students, but since we had game prototypes on display it turned into a prototype play-testing experiment. What I discovered was that the prototype for Horse elicited almost exactly the reactions that Henrik described in his initial pitch.

People would stop by and start playing with exclamations of 'oh, this is easy'. As soon as the mode changed, this quickly became 'what the fuck? Why am I not- I'm jumping?' And yet I rarely saw anyone walk away at this point. It seemed like the difficulty curve was just enough to challenge and entertain people, but not enough to frustrate them so that they stopped playing - they wanted to beat the game, but it didn't seem impossible.

There was one kid who came back at least three times in the morning and knelt down in front of the screen to play for 5-10 minutes with an expression of quiet concentration. I never actually said anything to him because I didn't want to break the spell, but it's probably fair to say that he was amused by it.

I also hacked in a few things over the weekend, just to see what people would do. They need to be cleaned up, but I will probably keep them all in some form:

- lives. At this point you start with three lives, and I rigged it so that that you get a new set every time the mode changes - for this context, I wanted people to be able to see all the modes before they ran out of lives

- a few seconds of invincibility when you respawn or start a new mode

- score bonuses when you skim very close to a block without hitting it (these were actually buggy, the bonus comes up but I forgot to have it add to the score. No-one seemed to notice)

- visual feedback on score subtraction when you die

- a brief instruction screen

- a game over screen which displayed your final score

Horse: The Supanova Build

Fuck screenshots...

...this is a flash game!

Controls: Up and/or Down. That's it. That's all you get. Every time the mode changes, the effect of those two buttons changes. It's up to you to figure the rest out.

Iteration the Furst: this is the version that was presented as a prototype on Wednesday 24 March



Feedback was mostly on the pacing - changing to a different screen between modes really disrupted the gameplay, and it felt a little slow. It's also perhaps a little too hard.

Iteration the Next: this is the slightly updated version that was presented for more different feedbacks on the following Monday. Not much changed, really, except for pacing. The whole thing is kind of more hectic (and possibly confusing?)



Still probably too hard, harder than the previous version, because it's faster. Some useful stuff came out of the feedback session, most importantly that we need to nail down our target audience before we iterate more. There are also plans in the wings for more player feedback and clearer flagging of new game modes. Some complaints were made over the acceleration and drag on the character movement, too. I am currently in the process of stripping down the code base and turning it into a more modular system.

ALSO the text is off-centre and it bothers me. I will fix that at some point.

The Prototype - Retrospective

Just some quick reflections on Wednesday's prototype presentation session.

I think, overall, it went pretty well. Everyone had something to show that answered some of the questions raised by the pitches, and the feedback and criticism given was generally constructive and meaningful.

The presentation of Fishman didn't go too poorly. I was of course disappointed that I wasn't able to demonstrate it clearly, but the reception of my explanation was not received as harshly as I might have expected. I think a large part of the problems that occurred with the prototype of Fishman was that Henrik and I were trying to tackle the prototyping of two games with just the two of us, while other teams were focussing on a single game or spreading the workload to more team members (the work for Lantern and Islands, collectively, was split between four people).

The key problem, however, was the inability of ordinary keyboard interaction to accurately demonstrate the gameplay mechanic. Fishman is something of an input gimmick game (this is not strictly a bad thing), and it really doesn't work without the mic input. I had put together a very simple demonstration in processing of how the volume information from the input could be used to raise and lower the height of a bar, but unfortunately the microphones on the lab computers weren't working.

The net result is that Henrik and I have decided to put Fishman on the backburner at this point. We are not giving up completely on the idea, and I for one still think it has the potential to be an interesting game, but I don't want to sink time solely into trying to get the code the input analysis to work properly when I could be developing something that I know we have already proven.

The presentation of Horse, on the other hand, was fairly successful. I think the prototype helped us towards answering the question about timing - there was some pertinent feedback given on this, particularly that the game should continue running when the player gets an alert that the gameplay is about to change. It was also recommended that we make the different stages more distinct, which I know was something Henrik had been planning on anyway. Over the weekend, I will be working on passing the game information between the gameplay states so that the player's experience of the game doesn't get put on hold when the state changes, while Henrik will be developing more art and designs.

We'll also both be tinkering around with writing some silly dinky 8bit music to put into the prototype, with musagi (I will probably also faff around with midi data in Pro Tools).

With regard to other people's prototypes, there was some really nice work demonstrated - some in particular that I would like to be involved in the initial design and writing stages of, as long as the core team members are willing to have me on board. I'll probably be sending out a few emails with more detail to this effect.

That's all I can think of that needs to be addressed for now. I am of course working out my individual contract to deliver to Matt by the end of the day.

Brutality

Okay, time for some honesty. The latest version of the fishman gameplay prototype is up here and I'm frankly tired of dancing around the main point that keeps coming up as I work on it, which is this:

It's shit.

It fails to communicate with the player, the interactions are unclear, it's clunky, and above all, it's boring and feels pointless. I know there are things missing, like a decent GUI and specific end states, but if the main mechanic feels like crap, then there's no point in dressing it up.

So. Failed experiment. Moving on to horse tomorrow, which I hope I can manage to not screw up.

The progress of fishman

Gradually getting somewhere with this. There is a newer, more playable and commented-code type version of the unity project on Dropbox. It suffers, at the moment, from grey box lolz visuals, but the key things are there.

To be honest, I'm not sure how well it's expressing the gameplay though. I know the theory of the mechanic is okay, but in practise it may well turn out to be a little lacking. Hmm.

Trying to nut out some better visual feedback for the player and tweak the feel of the gameplay now.

We are only going to spend at most another day on this before we move on to prototyping Horse in Flixel.

Technorage

Suffering from computer troubles of various kinds. Bizarre corrupt file problems have been plagueing my rubbishy Unity prototype project and I've had multiple crashes with no useful error information. Not to mention my usual Windows problems. So I've gone a little dim (not dark, I promise!)

Net result: I am behind in my work. This is something of a concern, particularly when I look around and see the amount and quality of work that other people have already achieved. It is time, therefore, to start pouring out that bottle of midnight oil into the lamp. So it begins, and so, I suspect, will continue - the next week will set the rhythm for the semester, and probably the year. Not what I would call an auspicious start, but we take what we can get.

Anyway, so. Here is my current complete trainwreck of a prototype on Dropbox, to be updated as frequently as I am able. There are grey things. They move. They move slightly differently if you press keys. It's a... well, it's a thing.

I suppose.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2512414/3114GFS/fishman2.zip

And so it begins

Along with Henrik, I will be prototyping my concept 'The Fisherman and the Moon', codename Fishman, and Henrik's unnamed concept, codename Horse.

First off, after a quick chat with Henrik, we decided to go ahead and work in Fishman in Unity, because we can use this FMOD plugin, which will be necessary for sound manipulation and analysis (more on this when I've looked into it in more detail). Horse, however, will be developed as a flash game, with the Flixel library in Adobe's Flex Builder.

The aim now is to get a functioning game working in Unity, with a variety of grey boxes to represent in-game objects and, at this stage, key presses in place of loud/soft sounds.

Tasks I'm working on for Fishman (Horse to come later):

- set up scene, locked to 2D plane
- on key-press
- the moon moves/changes direction/changes speed
- the fisherman's boat moves/changes speed
- win state when fisherman reaches shore
- loss state when moon gets too close (boat 'capsizes')

More as it comes to hand.