12 March 2010 3 Comments

Kill Birds With Rockets

The latest week-long production for my monthly week game challenge thingy thing:

What are you waiting for?

Tags: , , , , , , ,

3 Responses to “Kill Birds With Rockets”

  1. Facebook Indie Games 6 April 2010 at 14:30 #

    I enjoyed that game a LOT and agree that the turn based mechanic works extremely well. You can play it almost as a real time game, but it’s “alt-tab friendly” for sneaky at-work game play.

    For something that you designed and wrote in a week, this is brilliant. My question: why would you ever build a game that you COULDN’T release in a week? (After all you can always release follow ups and sequels — that’s the beauty of online.)

  2. Kyle 6 April 2010 at 15:18 #

    Cheers :)

    You’re exactly right about the game mechanic being alt-tab friendly and I think that contributes a lot to its popularity. Playing games in a browser is such a light committment in comparison with playing on a console (just have to click a link compared to turning the TV/console on, putting the DVD in the drive, etc…) that I don’t think the majority of people get as heavily invested in the games when playing them and so give them less attention as a result.

    In fact, I imagine most people surfing through web games will be checking out other websites simultaneously in different tabs or windows, so it can sometimes be unrealistic to demand a player’s full undivided attention as you’re essentially asking them to stop doing whatever they’re doing to play your game and usually punishing them with failure if they don’t pay attention for a split second. (Actually my game Cloud Rising is a good example of this – all it takes is a second missed and you plummet to the ground).

    So I think it’s important to allow the player to easily pause the game and take breaks whenever they want without punishing them. If I had spent ten minutes building up my forces in some strategy game only to die horribly while answering a knock on the door then I’d be pretty pissed and might not play that game again.

    I guess the gist of everything I’m saying is I like pause buttons and I like letting the player take his time.

    As for releasing games in a week I think its definitely advantageous in such a saturated market as online games (is there any figure on just how many games there are now?) as it increases your chances of getting that surprise viral hit and drastically decreases the amount of money needed to offset development costs. Just make sure the game is still good.

    But still, developers are creative beings and sometimes we just have those grand ideas that we love to take our time with and develop to the grandeur and splendour that we think it deserves :)

  3. Facebook Indie Games 7 April 2010 at 11:56 #

    Thanks for the reply.

    By the way, I disagree with you about the “luck” element being a bad thing. I think it’s an asset for casual gamers because it means that any player will succeed eventually. Even though it means that the game is less strictly skill based, I reckon it makes it more fun.

    Its main downside for casual gamers (particularly thinking of Facebook gaming myself, obviously) is that to do well in the game you have to play longer. If you could make the game more based on earning a high score in a fixed number of moves then I think it would have more replay value.

    For example, every time you destroy a bird a new one flies on — you’re not aiming to “clear” the field, but…

    - Each bird you shoot gets you some base score
    - Shooting several birds of the same colour in a row gets you bonus points
    - More bonus points for timing things so that several birds get blasted in a single “turn”
    - Even more bonus points for getting several birds with a single missile

    To make it fully Facebook friendly after that, you’d include some “unlockables” that people could buy with points earned or money paid — for example the ability to fire 2 missiles a turn, extend their game by a few turns, increase the missile’s blast radius.

    Incremental improvements on this game could turn it into a classic!


Leave a Reply