Month: November 2007

links for 2007-11-15

links for 2007-11-12

links for 2007-11-10

I was interviewed for the Playyoo blog

I was interviewed by Playyoo the other day

Most of you will probably know I’m involved1 with this new mobile game community called Playyoo. I haven’t blogged about it here explicitly because most of my contributions so far are still being developed and will hopefully hit the internet around December. I have an excuse to talk about it now though, because recently I was interviewed by the people of Playyoo for their blog. Read about my thoughts on the role of sociality in (mobile) gaming and how that will work in Playyoo’s meta-game, as well as what I think about casual games and the unique game design opportunities for mobile.

A quote from the interview:

What does the term ‘casual game’ mean to you?

‘Casual,’ to me, says something about the level of attention and engagement that a player has (or is required to have) with the game. For me as a designer, casual games provide interesting challenges. It might seem simple to create these casual games, but they’re actually quite tricky to pull off, or pull off well, that is. From a game design perspective, I think it’s more challenging to pull off a high quality causal game than yet another first-person shooter game.

Read the rest of the interview over at the Playyoo blog.2

  1. They’ve hired me to do game and interaction design. I have been working on mobile games, a game creation tool, and a web-based meta-game. [↩]
  2. Thanks to Alper Çuǧun for the photo that’s in the post. [↩]

links for 2007-11-08

Pollinator — a casual game prototype made with Mobile Processing

I wrote a game about a bee and flowers today

Last sunday I sat down and coded a prototype of a casual game in Mobile Processing. I got the idea for it the evening before: You’re a bee who needs to collect as much honey as possible in his hive while at the same time keeping a flower-bed blooming by pollinating… Play it and let me know what your high score is in the comments!

Thinking and making

I’ve been looking for an excuse to get some experience with Processing (particularly the variant suitable for developing mobile stuff) for a while. I also felt I needed to get back into the making part of the field I’ve been thinking about so much lately: Game Design. I agree with Saffer, Webb and others – making is an important part of the design practice, it cannot be replaced by lots of thinking. The things learnt from engaging with the actual stuff things are made of (which in the case of digital games is code) aren’t gained in any other way and very valuable.

Get the game

I’ve uploaded the first version of the game here. You can play it in the emulator in your browser or if your phone runs Java midlets, download the file and play it like you’re supposed to: While out and about. The source code is provided as well, if you feel like looking at it.1

Pollinator 0.1

How to play

You’re the yellow oval. The orange triangle in the top left corner is your hive. Green squares are grass, brown squares are seeds, red squares are flowers and pink squares are pollinated flowers. The field is updated in columns from left to right (indicated by the yellow marker in the bottom). A seed will turn into a flower (in rare cases a pollinated flower). A flower will die, a pollinated flower will die and spread seeds to grass around it. Move your bee with the directional keys, use the centre key to grab nectar from a flower. You can cary a maximum of 100 nectar. Drop your nectar off at the hive (again using the centre key) to up your score. When you first grab nectar from a pollinated flower and subsequently from a normal flower, the latter is pollinated. Try to keep the flower-bed in bloom while at the same time racking up a high-score!

You’ll get 10 nectar from a flower (in bloom or not). Pollinating a flower costs 5 nectar. If you try to take nectar more than once from the same flower, you’ll loose 10 nectar.2

Improvements

Stuff not in here that I might put into a next version (whenever I get around to it):

  • Animation — I need to get my feet wet with some scripted animation. Thing is I’ve always sucked at this. For now it’s all tile-based stuff.
  • Better feedback — For instance show the points you earn near the bee and the hive. I think that’ll make the game a lot easier to understand and therefore more fun.
  • Menus, pause, game over — It’s a prototype, so you get dumped into the action right away. (The game starts on the first key you press.) And there’s no actual game over message, the field just turns green and you’re left to wonder what to do.
  • Balance — I’m not sure if the game like it stands is balanced right, I will need to play it a lot to figure that out. Also there’s probably a dominant strategy that’ll let you rack up points easily.

The aim was to create a relatively casual game experience that will almost allow you to zone out while playing. I think it is far too twitchy now, so perhaps I really should sit down and do a second version sometime soon.

Mobile Processing

I enjoy working with Mobile Processing. I like the way it allows you to program in a very naive way but if you like structure things in a more sophisticated fashion. It really does allow you to sketch in code, which is exactly what I need. The emphasis on just code also prevents me from fiddling around with animations, graphics and so on (like I would in Flash for instance.) Perhaps the only thing that would be nice is an editor that is a bit more full-featured.3 Perhaps I should grab an external editor next time?

Feedback

If you played the game and liked it (or thought it was too hard, boring or whatever) I’d love to get your feedback in the comments. Anyone else out there prototyping games in Processing? Or using it to teach game design? I’d be very interested to hear about it.

  1. Not that it’s particularly good, I’m an amateur coder at best. [↩]
  2. I’m not sure this is the right kind of negative reinforcement. [↩]
  3. The automatic code formatting refused to work for me, requiring me to spend a bit too much effort on formatting by hand. [↩]