Chasing Perfection

September is here and the #1GAM theme is “perfection”. Which sounds pretty ambitious to me.

As I began to brainstorm, the abstract ideas about perfection came first. Such as:

• Chasing perfection means looking for something you can get closer to but never really achieve. So the game would need to encourage players to try levels over and over again to do a little bit better.
• This could be done through different play styles, or scores. Using  multiple scoring metrics that heavily analyze every little thing the player does would be good. There might need to be some sort of reward for those who aren’t natural score-chasers.

I had a few “game” ideas:

• Some kind of sports simulation (snowboarding was what really stood out to me)
• A stealth-action assassin game
• A point-and-click game where the protagonist sees visions of the future and then needs to set a scene exactly as he/she had seen it to progress (I’ve been watching Lost with my wife, so it would be similar to Desmond in season 3).

How to design a game that gets a person to replay a moment over and over again intrigued me. I decided I wanted to put the player in the shoes of an assassin (or thief) who needs to carefully craft a plan of attack, and then execute. Essential to this gameplay would be the ability to quickly go back, change the plan, and then start again, iterating on the plan until… perfection. Or until the player feels satisfied and moves on. That’s the thing, perfection really is unobtainable. You can never get there, but each person will determine for his or herself at what point the diminishing returns stop being worth pursuing.

I’m still hashing out the idea. One difficulty of being new at this means its really hard for me to gauge what I can and can’t do and how long it will really take. So getting my hands dirty gives me a better idea of what I can get done than planning, unfortunately.

But I will say that I’m prototyping a top down, stealth-action gameplay style with a Transistor-esque plan-and-attack system. Other influences include Hotline Miami, Gunpoint, Ronin, and X-COM.

First Post, First Game!

Well, I was hoping I’d be able to give a bit of background before I jumped right into this, but in keeping current, I’ll skip the backstory and jump right in. If you want to know more about me or this blog, check out the About page.

Before the word wall, here’s a link to the game: Play Stroids.

As August comes to the end, I’ve “finished” my first game. It’s called ‘Stroids’ (for lack of a better term). And is basically a clone of Asteroids, where instead of Asteroids breaking into tiny pieces, they drop experience points which you can use to beef out your ship. This is very necessary because as the game progresses, larger asteroids begin forming, which will require more firepower, a tougher hull, and maybe some power ups.

Or at least that was the idea.

Now, I’m using the word “finished” here very liberally, because when it comes to the game actually being a finished project, well…

• There is experience point collection and leveling up in the game, but this does literally nothing apart from change a number. Like Whose Line, the points don’t matter.
• I intended to implement more guns than just the beginning cannon but, alas, time constraints.
• Was going to make art for the starting menu. Right now it contains only the written title. I didn’t even really bother making a menu, truth be told.
• Some cool effects like slowing down time and bullet trails are included in the code but actually have no implementation whatsoever within the game.
• No tutorial.
• No music. Only rudimentary sound effects.
• Oh yeah, and no one else playtested it.

And that’s just the beginning.

But despite everything bad I could say about it, I don’t really feel like doing that. I really am just so proud of myself for finishing. Again, “finishing”, but still. I did it! And there are good things to say about it as well. Not to toot my own horn, but here are a few things I felt went well:

• Correctly simulates and draws geometry in Pico 8. Not novel or particularly amazing, but for me it is. It took me awhile to figure out how to rotate objects.
• Simple collision detection and somewhat accurate physics response.
• Random asteroid generation! Never two asteroids the same! Actually, because of the size and the limitations of variation (they have to be pretty close to a circle to mash the collision boundaries…), they all roughly look a like. I tried using line intersections for collision detection, but that was a mess.
• Sound effects are aight.

Maybe if you look at these things comparing to a standard of literally any existing game, they don’t seem that impressive, and maybe it takes someone whose done it to know how I feel right now, but I feel pretty good. Maybe that’s also because I understand this massive pile of salt, with which one would have to take my game: its my first and I actually made it in 8 days, not a month.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my first 18ish days of development were lost when I failed to back up my Unity files (and, oh yeah, originally I had done this all in Unity). I’d never even done anything in Pico-8 before 10 days ago. I’ve only owned it for about 12 days. I’ve only known it existed for about 14.

So maybe my game is only cool to me or if you understand the struggle. But, I loved (nearly) every minute of making it, and I learned a ton. I’m sure the next one will go smoother and then the one after that even better. And not linearly, exponentially. Think of how far medicine has come in the past 100 years. It hasn’t even been 100 years since the discovery of penicillin and before that our best practice was cutting off infected limbs. What I’m saying is once you get the ball rolling, amazing things can happen.

Again, you can play Stroids here.