dislekcia
03-08-2008, 04:18 PM
Comp 19 Results
Challenging people to look at their deepest held preconceptions about game design is an interesting experience. I first started thinking about how we take the idea of "death" being bad in games for granted when someone asked me how you'd be able to design an arcade game for home players. Early arcades wanted players to keep stuffing credits into the machines, they had to come up with ways to get you to end a play session quickly and frequently. Making the point of player interest constantly be able to die at any point due to the dangers of the gameworld made sense: You die, in goes another quarter and you try not to die there this time.
As games become more about people paying for enjoyable experiences instead of paying per play-session like in arcades, we really need to overcome that death stigma. As a mechanic goes, what are its benefits? What are its pitfalls? What can you get out of doing it differently? Here are your explorations...
REVIEWS:
Time of Your Life (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5933) - Ass_sazin
A puzzle game in which the player can become a ghost and walk outside their body, passing through solid objects and interacting with switches and the like to allow physical access to new areas. It's a concept with a lot of wiggle room that could be used to create some interesting puzzles - I think most people that played Prey felt that the spirit form in that game was sorely underutilised, for instance. Time of Your Life suffers in a few spots: It could do with better indication of goals to the player (although currently yellow seems to be the focus colour) and the player feedback on opening a door or solving a puzzle element is in need of strengthening. With a little more polish and a well-paced tutorial, this would be a wonderfully fiendish little puzzler. All you need to do is imagine ghosts electrically messing with equipment in a high tech military/science lab and things get interesting indeed!
Suicidal v0.5 (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5645) - Bonezmann
Another ghost mode/normal mode switch game, this time it's a potential puzzle platformer with wonderful little animations. Bonezmann is clearly a budding pixel-wizard in the making, his sprite works is coming along in leaps and bounds. The tutorial missions are nicely laid out and get you into the mechanics and ready for more just as the levels run out :(. This is a big shame: It would have been great to have to possess other bodies and plan more mayhem as a suicide bomber... I was even looking forward to having to blow up certain parts of the map and seeing what tricky little things I'd have to get past... Again, this mechanic has a lot of potential for enjoyment, especially with the amount of attention Bonezmann is capable of paying to the characters in the game.
Garden of Completion (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=6213) - Dingle
A review cannot actually express this well this game embraces the theme of the competition... The readme says it wonderfully:
This is a game not about trying to survive, or escaping death.
In this game, death is inevitable.
But, it is not the fact that you cannot escape death that matters.
It is about what you do while you are alive, and what you leave behind for others
once you are gone.
Once you realise that your expectations of death-defying gameplay are simply not going to matter, you start to appreciate the garden your sequence of final steps creates. It's fascinatingly stark, touching and surprisingly beautiful. It's a game on a different plane, bravo!
GraveRob (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5677) - DukeOfPrunes
Play as a zombie. Woo! Drag hapless greedy villagers underground with hordes of clutching green arms. Yeah! Ambush annoying knights and monks, shamble around eating brains, awesome! Well, technically you don't really eat any brains. But you're a zombie, so that should be taken as a given...
Essentially you have to protect the treasure you keep in graves (Brains?) from being dug up by bastard robbers. Taking robbers out means that knights come by to make with the stabbing. Destroying knights means deacons get sent after you with holy symbols that you have to drag beneath the loamy gravedirt. Once all your treasure has been swiped - which will totally happen, these people are as unrelenting as, well, zombies - it's game over and a submission of a high score.
Very cool gameplay, could do with a couple of tweaks like ctrl being burrow/unburrow - there's no reason to force players to hit ctrl and a different key just to dig up or down. Refinement of the ambush targeting would be nice too, we kept getting half-charged ambushes disappearing off people that hadn't moved. But apart from that, all this game screams for (hehe, screams!) is more cool stuff for you to do. Like raise more zombies to distract knights. Or bite people in the head from behind for insta-kills. It's still totally kickass fun :)
Tim Reaper (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5648) - Evil Toaster
Having been given a second chance at continued existence upon your death, you find yourself in the extremely competitive world of soul reaping. Using your trusty scythe, braai tongs or even corporeally challenged hands (each less effective than the one preceding it, FYI) you have to find souls and reap them before the other hyperactive Grim-esque reapers do. At the end of a specific time period you're up for employee review and only get to keep your job (and thus your existence) if you earn top spot.
This platformer is good for a few frantic minutes of fun trying to one-up the horde of bouncing reapers and keep your position. The levels are randomly generated and sometimes you get lucky with an area that's harder for the AI reapers to get to than you, giving you a much needed edge. As is usual with Evil_Toaster's games, the back story is where this gets most of its hilarity from (apart from the braai tongs - I mean, honestly) and the game definitely sports some amusing reads. Give it a playthrough - Maybe one day we'll see a more extensive version complete with employee reports up on Kongregate as ET get's more and more comfortable with Flash development.
Spanner in the Works (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5660) - Gazza_N
Everyone always agrees that we need more games like The Incredible Machine. Gazza's twisted mind decided to see what would happen if you crossed TIM with Lemmings... The answer? Fun!
At it's heart, Spanner in the Works is about destroying large and complicated edifices of cogs, gears, fans and pistons by getting little men (presumably all called Spanner, heh) killed in explosive ways near vital parts of said machinery. Gazza never progressed past the proof of concept stage, this is a shame because the concept is proven amiably and now cries out for countless toothy cogs to be gummed up by the mulched remains of otherwise well-meaning Spanner-clones. Add in nods to an astoundingly evil military-industrial complex (like needing to disable a factory that cans kittens for instance) and the resulting game would be made of hours and hours of win.
Ro-Bot Wars (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5683) - Oldtimer
Building a network game is always ambitious, networking is one of the trickiest areas of game development - at least until you start hitting threading in AI-driven systems... Still, Oldtimer needs to be commended for getting networking implemented in a deathmatch-style manner. There are a few issues regarding connections (we couldn't get the game to connect over a network, unfortunately - relying on two copies of the game on the same machine) and positioning/command order foibles. But those are to be expected in everyone's first network foray, they sneak up and bite you when you're not thinking about them ;)
The idea of becoming a trundling ball of death in order to exact retribution on your killers is always popular. At least in the circles I hang out in... But it doesn't really address the theme of the competition so much as give players a chance to get their own back. Rolling over your poor enemies is still fun though, unless they roll over you first. With some attention to the networking side of the game and a little more design applied to the rolling mechanic, there'd be more fun to be had here.
P.S. There's a networking framework you can use! Come to DevLans more often ;)
Death (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5680) - ShadowMaster & Edg3
Finally! An reason for all the weapon-toting scientists in our games these days! Death feels like a game not designed for this competition... The gameplay systems are great: The shooting mechanic is really well executed, especially with the targeting icon changing to show reloads and the like; The movement is solid; The story elements are all there for the devs to use. But it's not really on theme.
Don't get me wrong, the only thing letting the game down is a lack of content and some more creative enemies to battle and situations/maps to battle them in. But the zombification on "death" just feels like another healthbar, there's no challenging death's traditional role in a game when you can still die if your second healthbar isn't fully charged. For one, I really hope these two take the core of this game and use it to build something else on, something epic with silly guards and violently pro-active scientists ;)
Shinigami dairokkan (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=6068) - SkinkLizzard
This is a really cool little game. SkinkLizzard has created some amazingly well implemented spell effects and put them in a compelling control system. The three-tiered energy system can get a little confusing though - perhaps it could do with discrete left and right mouse button effect indicators on the spells/weapons your character uses.
This is definitely the most fleshed-out game of the competition, featuring eerie music, a fully tiled map with doodads and the afore-mentioned spell effects that just plain steal the show. Death is again used as a mode-switch to change the player's weapons and abilities, although in the Reaper form there's not much change to the core gameplay... Perhaps more energy-related feedback would help the system feel more robust.
Other than that, I want to explore this world, figure out how these abilities work best and fight more enemies. It feels kinda like Crimson Lands with magic and a more involved back story. That's never a bad thing!
Soul Reaper (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5707) - Smiley
Smiley built a feature-rich little framework for a side-on action game, complete with blended animation systems for player characters and a plethora of weapons. But as so often happens when systems development rears its ugly head in a game project: The game didn't materialise. Perhaps if Smiley gets/makes more time to work on this we'll start seeing some gameplay. It's a crying shame to see such a lot of work and some cool systems go to waste...
RESULTS:
It seems that death as an atomic action in games is rather entrenched: We've all grown up playing games in which the gameplay can suddenly end at some point because our collected mistakes have come back to bite us. That's fine, standard gameplay has and will continue to work, but what strange areas of play are we leaving unexplored? These entrants push back the boundaries a bit...
First place: Garden of Completion - Dingle
As soon as I realised that I was laughing in sheer delight at the things happening in "my garden", not caring at all about the impending spiky doom of my stickman, I knew this game had won. It really took the challenge of the competition and ran with it. Awesome.
Second place: Spanner in the Works - Gazza_N
In this game you can only progress by dying... Your little avatar's grisly demise is inevitable, planned even. All I can now imagine is a fully fleshed out game where you need to fall to your death on a conveyor belt which eventually deposits the corpse into a set of gears that power a piston, thus slowing the piston enough to allow your next life to use it to jump to another area and progress the puzzle...
Third place: GraveRob - DukeOfPrunes
The only game to move the loss condition to a resource outside the player, GraveRob's a lot of fun with some really cool perception-of-death concept trappings going on over that. Playing a zombie is fun. Playing a zombie that can't "die" traditionally and kick you out of the gameplay is even better!
...
It seems as though most people took the trappings of death as a human construct and tried to use those in some way differently. The interesting part was how they ended up replacing the gameplay side of death with something exactly the same: Run out of energy/time or rack up too much damage and "die - although we're not calling it that". Shows us all how attuned we are to losing in games - only two entries didn't have losing conditions built in!
Personally, I learned a lot from this competition. It was very interesting to see how people responded to the challenge and what they came up with. This sort of design-based conceptual competition strikes me as a good addition to the Game.Dev comp repertoire. We should see more of them in future, hope you're all ready ;)
-D
Challenging people to look at their deepest held preconceptions about game design is an interesting experience. I first started thinking about how we take the idea of "death" being bad in games for granted when someone asked me how you'd be able to design an arcade game for home players. Early arcades wanted players to keep stuffing credits into the machines, they had to come up with ways to get you to end a play session quickly and frequently. Making the point of player interest constantly be able to die at any point due to the dangers of the gameworld made sense: You die, in goes another quarter and you try not to die there this time.
As games become more about people paying for enjoyable experiences instead of paying per play-session like in arcades, we really need to overcome that death stigma. As a mechanic goes, what are its benefits? What are its pitfalls? What can you get out of doing it differently? Here are your explorations...
REVIEWS:
Time of Your Life (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5933) - Ass_sazin
A puzzle game in which the player can become a ghost and walk outside their body, passing through solid objects and interacting with switches and the like to allow physical access to new areas. It's a concept with a lot of wiggle room that could be used to create some interesting puzzles - I think most people that played Prey felt that the spirit form in that game was sorely underutilised, for instance. Time of Your Life suffers in a few spots: It could do with better indication of goals to the player (although currently yellow seems to be the focus colour) and the player feedback on opening a door or solving a puzzle element is in need of strengthening. With a little more polish and a well-paced tutorial, this would be a wonderfully fiendish little puzzler. All you need to do is imagine ghosts electrically messing with equipment in a high tech military/science lab and things get interesting indeed!
Suicidal v0.5 (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5645) - Bonezmann
Another ghost mode/normal mode switch game, this time it's a potential puzzle platformer with wonderful little animations. Bonezmann is clearly a budding pixel-wizard in the making, his sprite works is coming along in leaps and bounds. The tutorial missions are nicely laid out and get you into the mechanics and ready for more just as the levels run out :(. This is a big shame: It would have been great to have to possess other bodies and plan more mayhem as a suicide bomber... I was even looking forward to having to blow up certain parts of the map and seeing what tricky little things I'd have to get past... Again, this mechanic has a lot of potential for enjoyment, especially with the amount of attention Bonezmann is capable of paying to the characters in the game.
Garden of Completion (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=6213) - Dingle
A review cannot actually express this well this game embraces the theme of the competition... The readme says it wonderfully:
This is a game not about trying to survive, or escaping death.
In this game, death is inevitable.
But, it is not the fact that you cannot escape death that matters.
It is about what you do while you are alive, and what you leave behind for others
once you are gone.
Once you realise that your expectations of death-defying gameplay are simply not going to matter, you start to appreciate the garden your sequence of final steps creates. It's fascinatingly stark, touching and surprisingly beautiful. It's a game on a different plane, bravo!
GraveRob (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5677) - DukeOfPrunes
Play as a zombie. Woo! Drag hapless greedy villagers underground with hordes of clutching green arms. Yeah! Ambush annoying knights and monks, shamble around eating brains, awesome! Well, technically you don't really eat any brains. But you're a zombie, so that should be taken as a given...
Essentially you have to protect the treasure you keep in graves (Brains?) from being dug up by bastard robbers. Taking robbers out means that knights come by to make with the stabbing. Destroying knights means deacons get sent after you with holy symbols that you have to drag beneath the loamy gravedirt. Once all your treasure has been swiped - which will totally happen, these people are as unrelenting as, well, zombies - it's game over and a submission of a high score.
Very cool gameplay, could do with a couple of tweaks like ctrl being burrow/unburrow - there's no reason to force players to hit ctrl and a different key just to dig up or down. Refinement of the ambush targeting would be nice too, we kept getting half-charged ambushes disappearing off people that hadn't moved. But apart from that, all this game screams for (hehe, screams!) is more cool stuff for you to do. Like raise more zombies to distract knights. Or bite people in the head from behind for insta-kills. It's still totally kickass fun :)
Tim Reaper (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5648) - Evil Toaster
Having been given a second chance at continued existence upon your death, you find yourself in the extremely competitive world of soul reaping. Using your trusty scythe, braai tongs or even corporeally challenged hands (each less effective than the one preceding it, FYI) you have to find souls and reap them before the other hyperactive Grim-esque reapers do. At the end of a specific time period you're up for employee review and only get to keep your job (and thus your existence) if you earn top spot.
This platformer is good for a few frantic minutes of fun trying to one-up the horde of bouncing reapers and keep your position. The levels are randomly generated and sometimes you get lucky with an area that's harder for the AI reapers to get to than you, giving you a much needed edge. As is usual with Evil_Toaster's games, the back story is where this gets most of its hilarity from (apart from the braai tongs - I mean, honestly) and the game definitely sports some amusing reads. Give it a playthrough - Maybe one day we'll see a more extensive version complete with employee reports up on Kongregate as ET get's more and more comfortable with Flash development.
Spanner in the Works (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5660) - Gazza_N
Everyone always agrees that we need more games like The Incredible Machine. Gazza's twisted mind decided to see what would happen if you crossed TIM with Lemmings... The answer? Fun!
At it's heart, Spanner in the Works is about destroying large and complicated edifices of cogs, gears, fans and pistons by getting little men (presumably all called Spanner, heh) killed in explosive ways near vital parts of said machinery. Gazza never progressed past the proof of concept stage, this is a shame because the concept is proven amiably and now cries out for countless toothy cogs to be gummed up by the mulched remains of otherwise well-meaning Spanner-clones. Add in nods to an astoundingly evil military-industrial complex (like needing to disable a factory that cans kittens for instance) and the resulting game would be made of hours and hours of win.
Ro-Bot Wars (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5683) - Oldtimer
Building a network game is always ambitious, networking is one of the trickiest areas of game development - at least until you start hitting threading in AI-driven systems... Still, Oldtimer needs to be commended for getting networking implemented in a deathmatch-style manner. There are a few issues regarding connections (we couldn't get the game to connect over a network, unfortunately - relying on two copies of the game on the same machine) and positioning/command order foibles. But those are to be expected in everyone's first network foray, they sneak up and bite you when you're not thinking about them ;)
The idea of becoming a trundling ball of death in order to exact retribution on your killers is always popular. At least in the circles I hang out in... But it doesn't really address the theme of the competition so much as give players a chance to get their own back. Rolling over your poor enemies is still fun though, unless they roll over you first. With some attention to the networking side of the game and a little more design applied to the rolling mechanic, there'd be more fun to be had here.
P.S. There's a networking framework you can use! Come to DevLans more often ;)
Death (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5680) - ShadowMaster & Edg3
Finally! An reason for all the weapon-toting scientists in our games these days! Death feels like a game not designed for this competition... The gameplay systems are great: The shooting mechanic is really well executed, especially with the targeting icon changing to show reloads and the like; The movement is solid; The story elements are all there for the devs to use. But it's not really on theme.
Don't get me wrong, the only thing letting the game down is a lack of content and some more creative enemies to battle and situations/maps to battle them in. But the zombification on "death" just feels like another healthbar, there's no challenging death's traditional role in a game when you can still die if your second healthbar isn't fully charged. For one, I really hope these two take the core of this game and use it to build something else on, something epic with silly guards and violently pro-active scientists ;)
Shinigami dairokkan (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=6068) - SkinkLizzard
This is a really cool little game. SkinkLizzard has created some amazingly well implemented spell effects and put them in a compelling control system. The three-tiered energy system can get a little confusing though - perhaps it could do with discrete left and right mouse button effect indicators on the spells/weapons your character uses.
This is definitely the most fleshed-out game of the competition, featuring eerie music, a fully tiled map with doodads and the afore-mentioned spell effects that just plain steal the show. Death is again used as a mode-switch to change the player's weapons and abilities, although in the Reaper form there's not much change to the core gameplay... Perhaps more energy-related feedback would help the system feel more robust.
Other than that, I want to explore this world, figure out how these abilities work best and fight more enemies. It feels kinda like Crimson Lands with magic and a more involved back story. That's never a bad thing!
Soul Reaper (http://forums.tidemedia.co.za/nag/showthread.php?t=5707) - Smiley
Smiley built a feature-rich little framework for a side-on action game, complete with blended animation systems for player characters and a plethora of weapons. But as so often happens when systems development rears its ugly head in a game project: The game didn't materialise. Perhaps if Smiley gets/makes more time to work on this we'll start seeing some gameplay. It's a crying shame to see such a lot of work and some cool systems go to waste...
RESULTS:
It seems that death as an atomic action in games is rather entrenched: We've all grown up playing games in which the gameplay can suddenly end at some point because our collected mistakes have come back to bite us. That's fine, standard gameplay has and will continue to work, but what strange areas of play are we leaving unexplored? These entrants push back the boundaries a bit...
First place: Garden of Completion - Dingle
As soon as I realised that I was laughing in sheer delight at the things happening in "my garden", not caring at all about the impending spiky doom of my stickman, I knew this game had won. It really took the challenge of the competition and ran with it. Awesome.
Second place: Spanner in the Works - Gazza_N
In this game you can only progress by dying... Your little avatar's grisly demise is inevitable, planned even. All I can now imagine is a fully fleshed out game where you need to fall to your death on a conveyor belt which eventually deposits the corpse into a set of gears that power a piston, thus slowing the piston enough to allow your next life to use it to jump to another area and progress the puzzle...
Third place: GraveRob - DukeOfPrunes
The only game to move the loss condition to a resource outside the player, GraveRob's a lot of fun with some really cool perception-of-death concept trappings going on over that. Playing a zombie is fun. Playing a zombie that can't "die" traditionally and kick you out of the gameplay is even better!
...
It seems as though most people took the trappings of death as a human construct and tried to use those in some way differently. The interesting part was how they ended up replacing the gameplay side of death with something exactly the same: Run out of energy/time or rack up too much damage and "die - although we're not calling it that". Shows us all how attuned we are to losing in games - only two entries didn't have losing conditions built in!
Personally, I learned a lot from this competition. It was very interesting to see how people responded to the challenge and what they came up with. This sort of design-based conceptual competition strikes me as a good addition to the Game.Dev comp repertoire. We should see more of them in future, hope you're all ready ;)
-D