First off, I won the Silly Rage contest! It's a minor win, but a win just the same. For the uninitiated (and you are most likely uninitiated, as it was just invented a couple of days ago), "Silly Rage" is a budding twitter-meme (tweme?) in which you rage against something completely pointless. This was coined by Bill Corbett (of MST3K and RiffTrax and Film Crew and the script to that unfortunate "Meet Dave" movie last year). Basically he instructed us from his twitter feed for us to rage against something pointless in 140 characters and tag it with #sillyrage. The top rage would win a fabulous downloadable prize worth $3.99. My winning entry was the following. . .
johnhattan didn't realize that a horse was a horse. Thanks for rubbing
it in with "of course of course", condescending TV songwriter pricks.
(If you don't get the joke, then you're too young. Go back to watching Dora the Explorer.)
I was actually co-winner. The prize was also given to another user for
"..." Ellipses my ass. I see you, periods. Don't think you can be
a whole different punctuation just by traveling in groups.
Yes, it's a minor win. A very minor win. But whenever I get my funny validated it is a validation of my own fragile psyche. This win was tempered by two of my cousins saying they don't get my jokes. I can definitely see why, given the dry layers of subtlety in my humor.
Oh wait. It was a joke about freakin' "Mister Ed". Never mind.
Okay, that was pointless. On to actual work. Work on my next game, a Flash-based followup to my endlessly frustrating "Head On Collision" game is doing well. At first I had a hardcoded "maze" like the original one here.
The game, as I mentioned, is quite frustrating. You're the gray car going around the maze counterclockwise. The red car is going clockwise and is trying to kill you. You can only change lanes in the empty areas. You must collect up all the dots.
The AI required in this game is dirt-simple and amounts to "get in the same lane as the player". And it's so effective that the game's difficult even if the enemy car moves randomly (especially in higher levels where there are two enemy cars). And, like the 70's era arcade original, your chief weapon against the enemy is that you can accelerate while they're locked into a single speed, so with a little planning, you can usually force your enemy to choose a track before you do.
But one thing that'd bugged me about the game was that there were a couple of "deluxe" editions with non-square "mazes". ">Here is a fairly cheesy video of just this.
So I decided that this version would not only have a non-hardcoded maze, but the mazes could change from level to level. So I dragged out my free level-editor of choice, made some tiles, and drew up some levels. It took a few iterations of tiles, eventually coming out with lane-numbered tiles so the enemies could determine what lane they were in. I needed this because it's fairly trivial to figure out your lane in the above square maze, but this one is a mite more involved.
Thus-far it's working out fairly well. I'm still not sure how I'm going to handle the main menu and the progression and such. Is the maze above going to be level three, or will you choose this maze from the main menu and get to play it to its conclusion (you beat the maze or you run out of cars) and then you'll get a score and are returned to the main menu.
One other thing I found interesting about the above video, a little after 2:10 in, the car reverses directions and is then going the same direction around the maze as one of the enemies. The arcade game (at least this version) played pretty fast and loose with direction. In my maze above there's still not a way to un-knot yourself and end up going the same direction as the enemy. I don't see why that'd be a problem with collisions or such, so I might give it a try.
Also in my old version, the enemy cars were smart enough to never end up in the same lane together so I didn't have to worry about what happened if enemies collided. In the gordian knot mazes I can make now, that'll be nigh impossible to work around, so I'll have some kind of event if enemy cars collide. Maybe temporarily disable one.
But I digress. One thing I learned from Pop Pies and Pop Pies 2 is that brevity is one of the keys to replayability and the "viral" nature of Flash games. Games that you can play for an arbitrarily long time don't do as well as games that you play for three minutes and then finish and get on with your life (or press the "play again" button). While games like my recently-released Think Tank could conceivably be played for an arbitrary time, in reality it gets so difficult around level four or five that you'll be toast.
But this is an arcade game and not a puzzle game, albeit one with strategic elements. People expect to collect all the dots and then move to the next level. They might resent playing several times until they manage to collect every dot just to be presented with a "good job collecting all them dots, your score is 5211 points. Try to collect 'em all faster next time."
Also there's the "diamond versus ball of mud" element. The original "square" version of the game is taken down to its basest elements. I could certainly add little bonus gizmos that immobilize the enemies or collect every dot within a hundred pixels or stuff like that. From Pop Pies 2 I learned that adding mud to a diamond isn't really much of a problem. I added several little random helper bonuses to it, and it made the game more popular. While that does mean that there's less of a strategic element to the game (honestly, the best scores are as much due to luck as skill), people don't seem to mind so much the luck element as long as they get that lizard-brain gratification that comes from blowing up a truly colossal chain of pies.
And I did realize that "diamond versus ball of mud" is an obscure term, so I'll define. It was originally used to describe programming languages, but I find that it works better when defining small-scale games. A diamond is a game that is small and perfect. All of the elements fit together. You cannot remove anything from a diamond. And if you add something to a diamond, you don't improve it.
A ball of mud is a game that's defined more by what is added to it than its "core". A perfect example of a ball of mud is SimCity. No matter what you add to the game or remove from it, it's still SimCity. Yes, there's a "core" game somewhere, but it's useless without some amount of mud.
And speaking of lizard-brain gratification and winning things, later I'll post some lizard-brain gratification that lost something. There's enough blog here for now, so I'll talk about it in a day or two.
