give me something to break.
breakables.
Every couple of months, the team at WAGIC run Let's Break Games, a day where developers can come down with builds of their demos, get folks to play their games and try and break them. On this occasion it was a student day with a bunch of folks in their last year at Murdoch University coming down to get feedback on their games. It was a packed day, with heaps of people coming down to try out all the different games on show. I assume some were parents and friends but even besides that, I reckon it was 100-150 visitors. I spent about three hours there playing various games, thought I'd jot some thoughts down here. Some of these I already talked to the devs about, and some of it is just me thinking through stuff that might be interesting to try (but that the devs definitely shouldn't listen to).
pigeon panic.
The first student game I tried was Bird in the Hand by Low Polly Studios (great pun work in the team name there, no notes). They had eveloped a 4-player, asymmetric couch chaos game where players played as a bird or a human in a house environment. Birds had to knock physics objects off their places by knocking into them, and humans had to run around and catch the birds and put them in cages. It was a really fun little experience and really impressive that the team had decided to take on the task of messing with multiplayer lobbies, servers, etc. Some thoughts:
- More objects: The name of the game is chaos, so I think there could have been about 100-200 more objects in the house for the birds to knock over. I can't imagine the cost of the physics interactions would get too big given they are mostly static objects.
- Bird force: Moving some of the objects off tables before the human caught you was really tricky as they were flat and it felt like the collision of the birds wasn't quite catching it. This could be engineered out by making all objects a bit more 'pushable', but there is also the option of having an AoE force blast (wing landing) on a cooldown to use on the objects the player has trouble with.
- Teamwork: Besides the obvious of splitting the human's attention, there was also a mechanic where birds could break caged birds out if they stayed near the cage for a certain amount of time. This seemed to take a long time, long enough for the human to be able to stop it reliably (and take hold of the bird) in the time it took. Maybe a bit of tuning, or a persistent progress bar?
pogo pogo pogo.
The second student game was Bounce Boy. This was a mostly top-down arena shooter where the purpose was to charge up to shoot balls that bounced off walls against enemies that also shot projectiles that could bounce. The style was colourful and clean, with a large number of levels. The devs themselves actually admitted they hadn't gotten as far as some of the people who were playing that day. I randomly discovered I could destroy 'traps' of the environment moving up and down, which they realised was a bug (probably a tagging issue). Some thoughts:
- Even more objects: In a game with a simple mechanic such as this, it's important to make each shot feel important. Having a bunch of props to explode as your ball careens around the level would have made it feel more impactful. Similarly, there wasn't a lot of general juice to achieve the same.
- Camerawork: The game was played from a static top-down camera (i.e. always looking the same direction) that had the player always in the bottom third of the camera view. Unfortunately this meant that when the level extended downwards, it cut the players vision and I died more than once to enemies coming out of this blindspot.
- AI: No, not that AI. The enemy AI in this game was a little janky, with some getting stuck on walls and such during the playthrough. It may have been better to have completely static enemies and challenge the player with bullet patterns and reflections.
roguelikers.
There were also a couple of excellent roguelikes from outside the student cohort that were looking for feedback: Tomebound and Cyberdeck Shuffle. It was great chatting to them at a more in-depth level, both games are shaping up really well and I'm looking forward to seeing how they continue to evolve. All up, an excellent event and I really want to push and try and get something into the next one. Before that, though, I'll need to finish up a game for a friend, and get a demo loop going for WLDiG.
Alright, time to get up and at 'em. Until next time.
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idle thoughts.