HelixFox Games

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

What are you waiting for?

Over at the SA Forums, I’m taking part in a monthly week-long game design experiment. What this means is once a month I’ll be making a game and will only have a week to do so from start to finish. Usually there will be some sort of theme or design constraint to encourage experimental game design.

For each game I’ll also write up a post-mortem about what I was going for, what went right/wrong and how to improve upon that in the future. The idea is to experiment with game design ideas to see what works and what doesn’t, improving my overall ability to design games and come up with actual good ideas. Plus there’s always the possibility of coming up with a surprise hit or at least a very good idea worth developing further. I’ll also pump out 12 games a year and even if they all suck it’s better than nothing.

The first game is called “Get Out” and is thematically inspired by this thread.

Play it here.

Post-mortem:
Besides the obvious inclusion of the frog and other emoticons from SA, there wasn’t really any overall theme or design constraint when making the game. More than anything it was just an excuse to get out of the rut I’ve been in lately where I haven’t actually released anything for a very long time (over two years now, in fact). So I decided to make a dead simple side-scrolling shooter variant.

The biggest issue I ran into during development was, unsurprisingly, the deadline. I had a lot of ideas of extra things to put into the game but ultimately they had to be cut. A health bar for the frog, power ups, extra graphical effects, better music integration and other things were cut to meet the one week deadline.

Unfortunately, this sometimes had a knock-on effect of making other parts of the game less effective. For example, enemies have a random amount of health and so take a few hits to kill. There was going to be a sound and graphical effect when hit, but they were cut. The result is the game feels a bit frustrating when attacking the enemies as there’s no indication when they are hit and no way to tell how close they are to dying. In retrospect, the enemies should have only taken one hit to kill.

Another problem was the title screen “click your mouse a lot” when in actual fact the optimal way of playing the game is to hold the mouse down. I really didn’t think about this when I put it in, but I should have as it is actually a bit misleading.

I think the game suffers a bit from the frog’s invincibility. There’s no way to lose, even if you sit there and do nothing. The gameplay might have been improved by letting the frog die when hit by enemies, adding in an extra gameplay objective of having to avoid any enemies that you miss.

The ending of the game is the least polished and it kind of shows. An extra screen saying “Game Over. You scored ” or something like that with some buttons to return to the title screen or play again would have been quite good, I think.

Ultimately the game suffered because I didn’t have enough time to add in all the necessary features, which is largely because I didn’t manage my time properly in the early days, resulting in less time in the later days. Time management is going to the main thing I’ll focus on improving next month.

As I mentioned last month, I am taking part in the fourth game development contest on the SA Forums. I haven’t posted a new entry since then so it’s about time I posted what I’ve come up with so far!

The Game: Clicky

The theme of the game needs to be ‘Dealing with the devil’ and the most obvious way to incorporate this into the game is through the plot, which is what I’m going to do.

You will play as Eric A. Goon. A lonely nerd who spends his days complaining on the World of Snorecraft forums about how overpowered Doom Knights are and how machineering sucks. His secret wish is to obtain a lady friend, but he is far too reclusive and fat to have any hope of this. Cue the Devil’s appearance. He offers Eric the his heart’s desire for female company in exchance for a small favour… Eric must help the Devil steal souls from people in his town and use these souls to rain down destruction to annihilate the entire population!

The basic gameplay has you looking at a city from a top-down perspective with people wandering around. You have to harvest souls from the people when they are vulnerable (happens occasionally) and these souls act as a form of currency used to invoke various demonic powers which you use to kill the population. The aim will be to kill the entire area as quickly as possible.

Originally you were going to play as the Devil himself and the deals made would be with the people in each level to get their soul. You were going to have a cash fund to use to buy the people material items to bargain for their soul, but that sort of system is far too complex for such a short development schedule. It would also have been too “minigamey” within the context of the greater game, making the regular gameplay much too complicated – simplicity is the key here, I think.

So I changed it to people becoming randomly vulnerable (when they glow red), with you able to click them during this time to get their soul. Once you have a person’s soul, they won’t become vulnerable again (they only have one soul, duh), but if you miss your chance then you would never be able to get that person’s soul.

I ended up changing this as well as I figured it kind of sucks if you miss your chance with the people as you then have to really focus on clicking every person you can, taking the focus away from using the devil powers. I changed it so people will become vulnerable again after 30 seconds if you miss them. As it stands now it’s a fairly “Plants vs Zombies”-esque method similar to picking up Sun in that game – a fairly constant stream of currency that you have to devote a minor amount of attention to to obtain (so you can’t simply ignore obtaining it). I kind of like this way as it encourages the player to get as many souls as they can, but you’re not screwed if you miss some.

The main objective is to kill everyone and the devil powers are how you’ll go about doing this. Right now the game has Imps, Minions and Hounds implemented, which are all Summon type powers. They work by you dragging them onto the game area, where they then run around trying to catch everyone and kill them. Eventually there will be other powers such as outright killing people in a certain area, scorching the ground (killing everyone who steps over it), spreading disease (killing anyone infected and also spreading itself around). The aim is that the various powers will synergise well with each other combinations needed for maximum success (e.g. using imps to herd people into a corner, letting you get more of them with a single death power).

I have until the end of this month to finish this off and there’s still lots to do, so I’d better get cracking!

The Last Stand

By Chris “Con” Condon, this game pits you, the player, as a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. The aim of the game is the survive as long as possible in order to be rescued, fighting off waves of zombies as you do so. You control your character using the WASD keys to move and the mouse to aim and shoot against the zombies. Between waves, you can allocate day hours into searching for other survivors, weapons or repairing the barricade.

The gameplay is actually pretty simple, all you do is move up and down and click in the general direction of zombies to shoot at them (of course, it varies a little bit, with some zombies moving faster, having more health, or occasionally only having certain areas of their body be vulnerable), but it’s pretty addictive to play. The gameplay is broken up nicely by the management aspect between waves, letting you make a few strategic choices about how best to survive.

The main reason this game shines, though, is the absurd amount of style and polish that can be seen in all parts of the game. The “menu” screens are presented as a clipboard or other real-world objects (including the back of a receipt) with all the text made to look like handwriting. Tips on how to play the game are plastered on the clipboard as post-it notes. This works really well with the atmosphere of a zombie apocalypse, showing how supplies are limited and the survivors have to use everything as their disposal to get by.

The graphics in the game itself are superb, with all survivors and zombies being animated well, with enough variation in the player graphics to avoid noticeable repetition. Even the menu screen is polished, with blood spatters that flash in and out, sometimes making discernable shapes.

The overall feel of the game is very cinematic and reminds me of 28 Days Later, putting it way above the calibre of most flash games, and that is why it works; good aesthetics and pleasing gameplay.

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.

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!

An old HelixFox.com classic, Helix Defense is a traditional tower defense game where you have to build towers to stop waves of enemies reaching your reactor core.

To play the game, select a turret from the top menu then click on the level where you would like the turret to be built. You can also click existing turrets to select them and then see their statistics and upgrade them.

This game was made for HelixFox.com, my old website, about a year ago (october 2007) and enjoyed moderate success. This version has a number of bug fixes (particularly a bug with the chain turret which was awkward to fix) and balance adjustments making it very much improved over the original version.

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

Enjoy!