PK’ing duck: more on the vague game idea
So, last time, I had left off with the simple flapping prototype, with broken sideways movement. Where did I go from there?
Well, mostly, I went into two modes at the same time: one, thinking about the play experience, and the other, focusing on fixing the feed back that the model was giving.
Sorry, no fresh version today. 🙂 But read on for the thoughts I had:
It’s all about the feedback!
Games depend totally on the feedback provided; if you don’t give the right sort of feedback, people will not understand what is going on. To decide on the right sort of feedback, I had to pin down what the game was going to be a little bit better. I ended up concluding that the side view that I had pictured (and even started to implement in the version you saw) wasn’t actually what I was enjoying. Instead, I saw the bird as a top-down view, flying over a landscape. The effort to reach the top of the screen then became not an effort to stay off the ground, but instead an effort to fight the headwind, to fly faster. Once I made this mental adjustment, more elements of the game started snapping into place for me.
Since the primary mechanic was steering with wing flaps, this meant that the obvious things to add were challenges related to navigation to one or another point on the screen. The first one I added was gusts of wind from the side, making it more important to master the sideways movement and asymmetrical wing flapping that is the core of the movement mechanic. I did this by just implementing a “wind” variable that gradually moved to randomly chosen positive and negative values, and having it push the bird around.
(from A Grammar of Gameplay)
Do you have to prepare for the challenge?
…where prep includes prior moves?
…and you can prep in multiple ways?
Does the topology of the space matter?
…does the topology change?
Is there a core verb for the challenge?
…can it be modified by content?
Can you use different abilities on it?
…will you have to to succeed?
Is there skill to using the ability?
…or is this a basic UI action?
Are there multiple success states?
…with no bottomfeeding?
…and a cost to failure?
Why wind? Because it is the “topology” in my checklist of fun elements. The same challenge — flapping to the move the bird — but the territory matters. Other territory elements, such as obstacles to avoid, are also possible. Updrafts and downdrafts could be added as well, or (of we had other birds in the environment) riding in the slipstream behind another bird. But sidewinds would do for now.
I chose not to have head- and tailwinds at first, because the vertical movement was challenging enough. Instead, the game would assume a headwind; gliding would put you at the bottom of the screen.
I put a little bar at the top of the screen that indicated the direction and strength of the wind. But that wasn’t enough feedback to indicate that you were in a top-down view looking straight down at the ground. So I made the background blue, put little white speckles scrolling down, and added big ol’ alpha’ed clouds that also scrolled down. The further up the screen you were, the faster the speckles and clouds scrolled down. I also made them blow around with the wind — speckles in the direction opposite to the wind, so you had the sense the ground was sliding away from you, clouds with the wind so you saw that they were being blown just like you.
I also fixed the sideways movement up a bit, making it so that you slid sideways when holding one of the wings at its max flex point. There’s still the strange “hold one wing, flap, then let go and slide sideways” behavior, but now it feels like the aftereffect of the flex. Still not tuned right, but closer.
The old and new birds
I also decided that the visual feedback on the bird needed work. The wings didn’t arch up high enough when you were flapping optimally. I moved some of the points around on the wings to get them closer to the look I wanted. Now when you were flapping vigorously, it looked like it a bit more. Finally, I fixed the broken look when the bird drifted down from the top of the screen.
All of these things basically enhanced the sensation of flying without actually changing very much. And more importantly, they were all about mechanics and feedback, not about “dressing.”
Thinking about theme and dressing
It would have been easy to make this a combat game. Think ornithopters a la Miyazaki, shooting at skyborne or groundborne targets. Or a bird pooping on things on the ground. As I joked to my wife, a PK’ing duck (groan….). But a lot of what I enjoyed, and apparently others as well, based on the comment thread, was the sort of Zen meditative vibe you got from just trying to fly well. So I wanted to avoid combat.
Wind gauge, speckles, and clouds
Instead, I started thinking about ways to reinforce the Zen feeling. And one of the ways I came up with was music. As it happened, I had been messing about with a guitar piece that hadn’t come together and was nothing but a bunch of related little riffs. So I thought about recording those as individual bits, and firing off the riffs dependent on the bird’s situation: more aggressive flight playing the faster ones, drifting down to the bottom and doing nothing playing the bass line only, and so on. I’d only be getting a new music state periodically, when the last one ended, so the loop should move seamlessly from one to the other.
I also started thinking about the challenge to accomplish; I now had a landscape, so the challenge should be navigating it. Basically, getting to a spot on the screen, or avoiding a spot on the screen. I decided that I would likely put bugs or other birds or something on the screen at the spots you want to reach or not.
I decided that even my crude ocean was kinda neat. A more varied landscape would be ideal — and even better would be the ability to dive into it — by zooming the entire background in and out. I even pondered doing “above-view Joust” where you have to dive down onto something to catch it. I still don’t know what any of this looks like (though I am still interesting in that Andean look), but now the picture of what I want to do is coming together.
Lastly, I thought about the nature of the game, again prompted by some of the comments. I concluded that the vibe permitted it having a narrative, perhaps. Not a standard “get to the other side” narrative built out of challenges, but maybe literally just a story that was told based on how far you got. More of an “experience” than a game where you try to survive forever — a game that had an ending. And the path maybe would vary based on how well you had one. At the end, maybe the bird arrived at a destination starving and lonely, and the story was a sad one; or it arrived plump and well-fed, and the story was one of joyful swooping. I don’t know — still vague.
The next step is likely to try putting in things to catch on the screen. They need to be flying things that can get ahead of you, to force you off the bottom edge of the screen.
Hope you’re enjoying this look at the process. I am not significantly ahead of you guys as you read this. 🙂
16 Responses to “PK’ing duck: more on the vague game idea”
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It looks like an Atari 2600 game. 🙂 Fascinating to watch your process, though.
cant wait to see where it all leads
Hope you don’t give up putting in those colour trails. This game reminds me of The Endless Forest with the antelopes? Have you seen that?
You might think about adding raptors; smaller birds are very conscious of the danger from birds of prey.
This affects their flight behavior, causing them to fly below tree level, not above, which of course, makes flight more challenging since there are branches and leaves to avoid, and the wind currents are constantly shifting (being irregularly blocked by trees). Also, if flying against wind, birds are more likely to fly through the trees since the wind is slower.
Raptors also attack from the sun so that birds (a) won’t see the raptor’s shadow, and (b) won’t see the raptor as it’s visually overwhelmed by the sun.
And don’t foget the extra challenge of carrying a coconut… or two swallows together trying to carry a coconut…
You might find a fun variation using insectivorous bats instead of birds.
even better would be the ability to dive into it
Makes me think of the game as a between-game, where you’re exploring the world, and then diving in and switching to adventure game mode, or something.
[…] Comments […]
On the Zen-like nature of soaring…
The final programming exam for my DirectX class involved a similar top-down look at flight. Granted, it was a more military-themed version with an A-10 flying over a dessert that had rock pinnacles rising up to different heights and no flapping was involved, but other than that it was the same. 😛
Anyway, I did something pretty simple that had a tremendous impact on how the game felt. I tied side-to-side movement to the roll of the plane (there was no yaw) and had roll automatically move smoothly back toward zero when there was no input. So, when you gave input to move right, you would move a little as the plane started to roll and then your side movement would pick of speed as the degree of roll increased. When you let off, the plane would continue to slide in that direction, slowing down over time as it leveled out. I liked the feel of it so much and spent so much time tweaking it that I ran out of time to implement the scrolling dessert texture (I just had the rock spires). Oh well. I think I still learned something.
Of course, what is described is not really an ingenous solution. It’s pretty intuitive to anyone who takes a moment to think about it. But what struck me afterward is that physics is fun. Not necessarily Einsteinian or even Newtonian physics, but making the soaring motion look and feel how it might be expected to look and feel in real life added to the Zen-like experience of flying. Similarly, playing a racer with the ability to power-slide around corners is fun for me. And this made me think back to A Theory of Fun where you talk about fun as a reward for learning. Does the brain hand out an increased amount of the fun sensation for solving problems that are more readily applicable to real world scenarios? Could this explain why I find the experience of physics more fun? For me, this is a fascinating question that has some pretty important implications for game design.
–Phin
–Phin
I agree with the note on physics. Giving the bird a little weight and momentum could add a lot.
I’ve enjoyed your recollections of design from the MO’s you’ve designed in the past. It’s more interesting to follow your thoughts and design as it evolves (even for something relatively simple like this). Hope there will be more of these.
I realize this is unlikely to happen, but it would be wild to read a blog of the hardships and successes as you work through your new indy project.
Sounds to me like Raph should be including a NDA and also sending submissions to SEGA about Panzier Dragoon Online.
BTW jousting on dragonback (bird) inside an MMO would certainly be a new tiwst to the MMO Genre. Thanks for sharing Raph, and hopefully there aren’t two games announced with this feature that take or “borrow” your ideas before yours gets from design stage to final product.
Zen is good, but it’s too happy IMO, that’s why I always went taoist, because it was about wildly swinging, instability of motion/emotion that requires the opposites, resulting in turmoil of balance.
Jousting, or just about any real combat reason to be on a mount while fighting is really long overdue in the MMO space.
Or no wait… Dragonlance Online… or Dragon Riders of Pern Online (DROPO hahaa)
That’s assuming that it is linked to an existing IP before it’s the “innovation” semi-copied into ip properties to follow.
I’m still interested if it’s jousting on birds too, but.. dragons was more what I kept thinking reading this, Raph. Still a cool innovative idea to tamper with though.
So no one here ever jousted in UO? Get a high-damage, long-delay weapon. Get a horse. Your attack goes off right when you come into contact with the monster, their attack doesn’t go off until a bit later, by which time you’re out of their range. Wait for your weapon’s delay to expire, charge in again. Works on multiple opponents, even. As long as they’re pure melees, like that one dungeon full of giants and earth elementals.
My team is developing a game now with a character template for a Lancer, with a Stirrup ability that gives you a bonus to damage based on the weight of you and your mount. Additionally, I had the idea of including a 3D upgrade to Joust as a minigame, to provide more than one use for riding-related abilities. 😉
But all that just goes to show you how cheap and common even the “innovative” ideas really are. In the end we may not be able or inclined to implement either of those ideas, or they might not end up being implemented very well. We’ll see.
On the other hand, Raph’s already a great deal of the way to a playable prototype based on those ideas. THAT is worth something.
As an aside, anyone here ever played “Cloud”?
I think this is a great idea for a game concept, probably something that could be adapted for the Nintendo Wii 🙂
In my minds eye I see a view of the landscape and sky from upwards and behind the bird, far enough back that I can see the wing, they can flair when I need to land, and twitch left and right. Ocean and islands in front of me as the wings flap. I also see a very zen-like exploration as part of the goal.
The game could have a “build your own” bird option where you customize what kind of bird you see yourself as, I also like the idea of picking a bird from a list, each bird flies slightly differently.
I’m a little weak on purpose though, it doesn’t feel like a fighting game, but if it goes too far into “national geographic” will it still be fun?
Great concept, absolutely love to see this progress.
Claudious Zankin
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