Concepts Part 2

Everyone is saying it’s a bit like Go, or even that dot game, the one where players draw connecting lines between points and try to create squares. Which is interesting, because while creating the idea neither of those came up as inspiration.

I’ve played Go with Taylor and my biggest problem with it is that the game is so slow.  The Dot game comparison is closer, because when comparing them, players both have chances to create chain reactions that would drastically change the field of play.

What I wanted to create was a basically a digital board game. From the very beginning I had this image of two players across from one another in a coffee shop, playing on an iPad. In pursuit of this vision I did a few things with the layout.

1. As few as text as possible, most of it is represented through iconography. The quit button is an X, the rules are a ?, each of the maps include a small diagram of what they are beneath them.


2. The unlocking tiles have the color slowly fill in addition to having a numerical value, so just by glancing at it the player can see if it is filled or not.


3. Player’s pieces are on opposite sides of the board. If they are indeed playing across from one another, players don’t want to reach across the game board, obstructing the field of play in order to select their tiles.

The beautiful thing about the game is its simplicity. The primary game loop, is less than 600 lines of code. Each tile keeps track of its current state, its owner, and knows whose turn it is and what they have selected. It all comes down to incrementing tile states. If its player 1’s turn and they have a level 1 tile selected and they click on an empty space, it becomes theirs; the tile is flipped and turned the correct color.

For each tile there is only a finite number of states. The cool thing about the game is dynamic nature of changing those states and causing cascade events.

By Tuesday I had it working all working and realized that we could actually put it out for distribution. The game might not be feature complete, but players would at least get a taste of the gameplay and would hopefully give us feedback on what they like/don’t like or what they want to see added next.

So I pitched to everyone a deadline of Friday. I wanted to try what the Super Meat Boy guys did with the original SMB, a free flash game that was available on the internet that gained followers. And that is what we are going to do. Already, since the Friday deadline a whole new mechanic of differing terrain has been added! And soon to be uploaded will be a much better tutorial!