Game Design Drift
I’ve been working these last few months on my next casual game. The new game is a match-3 style game with what I consider to be a fairly interesting twist on it’s mechanics.
This time around I’ve been a little more close-to-the-vest with the game than I was with Bonnie’s Bookstore. The new game is within a more competitive genre, and the key innovation of the game could easily be copied by others.
I know, I know, who would ever copy/clone a game concept in the casual market?
The downside of this is that I haven’t been seeding alphas around like I did with Bonnie’s Bookstore. Two months into BB’s development, probably 50 people had seen the game, but for the new game, at about the four month mark, I’ve shown or sent it to less than a dozen people. (One of those people was my 6 year old daughter - she liked it, and was better at one of the mini-games than me.)
When I don’t get regular feedback on what’s good or bad about the core elements of the game, my focus tends to drift. It doesn’t take long for the game designer (me) to get bored with the basic game, and waste, err, allocate time to peripheral aspects.
So I’ve done some quasi-goofy stuff:
1) Added 7 mini-games aside from the main game
2) Created a global high-score system, rolled from scratch (teaching myself a bit of PHP along the way)
3) Added an overly complicated flame system to the game, used for one small-ish effect (a torch and something it burns)
4) Added an overly complicated system to track the beat of the background music for the game, in use for a single interface element (twin flowers which vibrate in time with the beat).
None of these things really add anything to the core game. Still though, while each individual element seems like a slightly foolish waste of time, in the aggregate, I think these (and others) do add value to the game - taking it from an interesting game mechanic with pleasant graphics, to, hopefully, a polished game that hooks the player in any number of ways.
My reference point here is Super Collapse 3, recently released by Gamehouse. It doesn’t add much, gameplay-wise, to Super Collapse 2, but the overall package is a lot of fun. It has a better UI, more mini-games, a great quest mode, some splashy particle effects, and lots of other things that kept me hooked on the game through the 60 minute trial, got me to buy the game, and play it to completion (~5 hours of gameplay).
Link-o-matic
There’s a thoughtful interview here with indie developer Svero, a longtime poster on the indiegamer forums, and incidentally, one of the handful of people who’ve seen my new game.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
To some extent we’re betting on the same philosophy. Obviously there is no substitute for solid gameplay but polish items that bring little to the gameplay seem to be more frequent these days. The little…slaves I guess they are, in 7 Wonders are a good example. Without that touch would that game have seen the top spot on the large portals? Remember the dancing skeleton reward screen in Treasure Island? Shortly after the release of that game I read 42 Real Arcade reviews. Nineteen of them commented on the dancing skeletons. Would it have scratched the top 10 without them? What about fancy, animated loading screens and/or company logo screens like Refexive uses? A waste of time for a small developer or a solid contribution to the overall package? Particle effects? Always good I think if they fit the theme.
Mini-games are harder to judge as you may not know exactly what the players were reacting to or were indifferent to. I think they bring something to the table when used to compliment a more substantial gameplay but in the case of Tropix I’ve been hesitant to credit their success to the fact that the game consists of eleven mini-games. Most of those mini-games are average implementations of tired old gameplay with no innovation whatsoever. Jungle Jump however, was a solid, newish, arcade game done well. Did they need the other ten games? It definitely helped them in the area of progression as you had to unlock the last few but I doubt many players spent much time actually playing them.