HelixFox Games

I like zombies, as people who read this blog have noticed.

I found a site that has a pretty good list of all zombie-related flash games: Zombie Games.

Had a blast playing Pandemic 2 via this site, which I’ve somehow missed before. I realise it’s not actually a zombie game but it’s still good!

While at Flash on the Beach last year, one thing that was gotten across quite a lot was the “KISS” principle, or “Keep it simple, stupid”. The basic idea behind this is that when designing something (this principle applies to a great deal, not just games), simplicity is one of the most (if not the most) important things to consider.

While reading a forum thread about Valve’s latest game Left 4 Dead, I noticed a lot of people were being armchair designers and suggesting “cool things” to add to the game that they thought would improve the overall experience. I’ll list a few of them here and why they wouldn’t work:

1. Having other groups of survivors holed up in various locations. You could barter with them and trade ammo for medkits or vice versa! Or you could just kill them and take their stuff! One of Left 4 Dead’s main strengths is its fast paced gameplay and the high level of tension it maintains throughout, giving you the feeling that you are never safe. Stopping to barter either means you break the pacing and tension while you shop around (by stopping zombie attacks while you interact with the survivors) or you are constantly being attacked while shopping, making the exchange annoying as hell. Either method wouldn’t work.
2. Have a huge open world city with a start area and a target area. You could take any route you want to get to the goal! Valve originally had something like this in mind but they found that players would often get lost as there was no clear way forward. As they explored the city, they would often end up at places they had already been or run into dead ends, getting frustrated. These problems go away as players learn the layout of the city, of course, but once players know the layout of the city they also know the best routes. Once players find a “best” route, even if it only shaves seconds of the overall travel time or is only marginally easier than other routes, they will always use this roure, to the total exclusion of others, turning it into the linear game it is now, except with huge amounts of wasted time and effort given to the areas that players will forget about. Valve applied the KISS principle and resigned the levels to be simpler and more linear.

I mentioned above that players find a “best” way to do things and stick to this no matter what. This is true in most situations (well, why would you do things worse?) and can especially be seen in online games like World of Warcraft. In WoW, you can compare two damage-dealing classes and if one does, say, 1100 damage per second and another does, say 1045 damage per second (5% less), everyone will consider the latter class to be vastly inferior than the former, despite the fact that a 5% damage difference is largely irrelevent in all but the most cutting edge of content (which only a small proportion of players will ever experience). This is foolish behaviour but it exhibits itself whenever some level of competitiveness is present in online games. However, it’s a matter of psychology rather than pure game design. I’m also digressing a lot.

So yeah, keeping it simple. When designing a game, you will inevitably think of cool things to add to the game that you (and your friends) think will make the game that much better. But will it? Be careful with every feature you add to the core gameplay and really ask yourself “is this worth it?” as good gameplay is a volatile mistress who can be upset by the slightest thing.

An example of this in one of my games, Helix Defense, I thought about adding boss character waves in, where instead of 10 ships attacking there would be a single really strong ship. I tried it briefly but something about it bugged me. I took it out in the end, mostly for reasons of turret balancing (the game is balanced around all turrets being roughly equal; having waves with a single strong enemy skews this by indirectly making turrets that attack a single target better and turrets that attack multiple targets weaker).

When I released the game there was only a single enemy type whose health and speed increased for every wave. All the turrets were roughly equal at killing these enemies, which I liked. The game was simple and easy to pick up while still maintaining a good level of variety, which I also liked. However, I now think there really should have been more variety with the enemies. One of the main things I noticed from people who played the game was that people almost always ended up using the chain turret exclusively (along with the slowing turret, which was always essential), even though it was only a little bit better than the other turrets. This goes back to the player behaviour thing I mentioned above.

The game was too simple, in the end. There was very little to differentiate the turrets (aside from the slowing turret, again) as their only job was to do damage to enemies. There should have been some other incentive to use every turret to encourage the use of all turrets. Perhaps having different kinds of enemies that are susceptible to different kinds of turrets would have solved this? It would take experimentation to see if this is the case or not.

These are the things I have to consider when designing Helix Defense 2 (hoping to come up with a better name for it).

(You may have noticed that it hasn’t been released yet, despite I said it might be done in january! Well, between work and family i’ve been quite busy. I’m still working on it, I promise!)

That’s enough rambling out of me for now. Tata.

Whenever my mind tends to wander, I start to think about ideas for games and how those ideas could be implemented in Flash. I’ve had some wacky ideas and, as my own game development continues at a glacier-like rate, I’ve decided to share one of my ideas here, with possibly others to follow. Hopefully someone else gets some use out of this idea!

Some Sort of Zombie Survival Game
Some sort of amalgamation of Tower Defense, The Last Stand, Left 4 Dead and Enfo’s Team Survival (which you won’t know unless you played Warcraft 3).

The basic premise of the game would be viewing an area (perhaps a deserted street) top-down and giving you a number of survivors (not too many, maybe 2-6) which you can place around the area, much like a TD. You could then equip each survivor with stockpiled weapons, ammunition and equipment. You could also have a supply of debris to use to set up barricades.

When night hits, waves of zombies attack the survivors and try to kill them. The key to victory would be to position survivors in safe locations where they can defend themselves well, while also micromanaging them. During levels you would be able to move survivors around RTS-style and issue orders, such as giving weapons to other survivors or just to run away from zombies.

Maybe there could be some sort of daytime gimmick, like in The Last Stand, where you search for more survivors or weapons, etc.

The game would mostly be played like a TD until shit hits the fan, at which point it would turn into more of a RTS, frantically clicking to try and salvage the situation.

I would love to make this game but I don’t have the time!!!

Progress on Helix Defense 2 goes reasonably well, given the extremely limited amount of time I have to work on it (I typically have no more than 2-4 hours to myself each day and I do deserve some time to rest, you know! ).

I’m hoping to get some sort of preview up soon, but i’ll need some prettier graphics for that and at the moment i’m stuck with red and green triangles and squares, which are quite garish to look at. Nevertheless, most of the core gameplay mechanics are in place; it’s just a matter of fleshing the whole thing out with content now and then, of course, testing testing testing!

I finish work for the year this week and if all goes well I’ll have some more time to devote to it after that. All things considered, a January release date seems reasonable to me right now. Whether this will actually happen or not remains to be seen…

I saw over at gigoam.com that they have a list up of the ten most played flash games on the mochi network in 2008.

Most of the entries are pretty predictable but one of them was really strange: Paris oh Paris. The game consists entirely of throwing fatty foods at Paris Hilton to fatten her up and it’s actually quite addictive, if only for the completely gross animations. The crowning achievement is when you want to play again the game treats you with a disgusting interpretation of liposuction to get her thin again. Hilarious!

An old HelixFox.com classic, Cloud Rising is a game where you have to rise as high as possible into the sky.

To play the game, just click the mouse to jump into the sky. You must collect white clouds and rainbow clouds to fuel your ascent into the sky while avoiding all other types of clouds as they will hinder you.

This game was made for HelixFox.com, my old website, just under a year ago (december 2007) and enjoyed moderate success.

The game was made and compiled using Flash CS3 in ActionScript 2.

Enjoy!

I just came across this game today (http://fantasticcontraption.com/) and had a blast with it. The gist of the game is you have an object and need to get this object to the goal zone. This is accomplished by constructing crude machines out of a number of component parts available to you that will (hopefully) propel your object to its destination.

I blew through the first few levels fairly easily but the difficulty soon ramped up and found myself coming up with some elaborate schemes to try and complete each level (going through quite a lot of failed attempts before finally cracking it).

One of the best features of the game is, once you have completed a level, you can see the solutions made by other users of the game. There was one level I had completed by creating a giant set of stilts that were weighted down on one side, letting the object fall into the goal zone. Another user had managed to create a giant whip, with the object attached to the end of the whip.

I’m generally a sucker for physics based games and this one impressed me greatly.