It has taken a while to take the game Number Ninjas from the experimental gameplay challenge prototype to a complete flash game. But im glad to inform you it is done and online at armorgames.com. Go play it.

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Category: Games
Tags: Platformer Number Ninjas
Sunday, June 26, 2011 11:05

My third experimental gameplay challenge entry is called "We the Giants". It took me about 4 to 5 days in total and turned out totally different than the initial idea I had in mind.

I don't want to spoil the experience so ill keep it short this time. Just go check it out at wethegiants.thegiftedintrovert.com

Update (December 30th)

Below are some recorded player sessions of giants trying to reach the stars.

18th Dec, 2009, 19th Dec, 2009, 20th Dec, 2009, 21st Dec 2009, 23rd Dec, 2009, Christmas

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Category: Experimental Gameplay
Tags: Experimental Gameplay
Sacrifice. Giants
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 20:05

September's theme for the experimental gameplay challenge was all about failure. I did not join until a week and a half before the challenge would end when a random brainfart got me motivated to explore it further.

The idea from the start was to do show a young girl tying to keep her parents together while they are in the midst of a divorce. The failure from the start has been the parental failure as in the parents not considering their daughter in the process of the divorce. In this I wanted to express a few ideas being 1.) the effect the divorce has on the girl and her world, and 2.) her naivety in trying to make things better.

I started out building a simple platform engine from scraps of code I had lying around and made them fit each other until a silhouette of a young girl could run left and right. From this point on I added some grass and flowers to represent her world as serene and simple.

Initially I didn't add the parents visually but instead just showed their degrading marriage through words flying from left to right and vice-versa. I wanted to enhance this by having an audio-sample in the background that mimics a couple verbally fighting and wanted to add an echo to this sound to enhance the illusion of being in the girls world. Though, not being able to find a decent audio-sample that could fit I resorted to representing the parents visually and having one on the left side of the level and the other on the right side. The words representing their degrading marriage remained but now each parent would slowly fade out over time supporting the metaphor.

At this point I had 2 procedures in mind for the girl one being to kiss and another to scream. The kiss procedure acted as the action which would bring the parents closer together. I liked the kiss procedure because I felt it could represent her naive understanding of the situation by thinking her parents marriage can be saved through giving kisses, mirroring the parental behaviour of when a child is hurt and a parent gives a kiss to make the child feel better.

The scream procedure has been added and removed various times until I felt it was in the right place. The first time around I had the game tested among fellow Game Design & Development students the main lesson was that gameplay wasn't all that interesting though most could appreciate the message being put forward.

With this in mind I started tweaking the game by making the parents this time really drift apart instead of just fading out. The words from the parents initially had not effect on the girl but eventually would release a monster that would crawl up from the ground. I personally felt that at some point I stacked so many metaphors on top of each other that most were missed anyway so I tried to make changes in these some more.

Eventually I had the words affecting the girl, making her more slow and the scream procedure as a counter for this. I liked it best in this way because it was pretty easy to understand the real-life connection that the words also affect the girl. Also the fact that the words now would stay on the ground represented well how her world quickly changed from a decent environment to a chaotic environment.

All in all, i think the game can be better balanced by giving the player the initial illusion that there is a win situation. I think many players might just give up the second they understand the game cannot be won. I feel, the entire game is carried by the message it portrays and I know the gameplay isn't all that interesting or challenging but never the less I think the message alone is enough for an interesting experience.

Result : Six and a half

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Category: Experimental Gameplay
Tags: Experimental Gameplay
Divorce Serious game
Thursday, October 1, 2009 23:05