| Experimental cash flow game? And game design dream (literally). |
[Mar. 2nd, 2008|04:34 pm] |
I've been designing a game on the way to and from CollabRx (I'm consulting there) based on the idea of using games to express the dynamics of a given system through metaphors that are more fun to play. This was directly inspired by recent experimental games by Rod Humble (The Marriage) and Jason Rohrer (Passage).
Before I've been playing with the idea of using this metaphoric gameplay as a way to teach things, like say programming competency. The idea being that if you can create an metaphor for the way of thinking about programming that's abstract enough, you can implement it through gameplay without being totally obvious it's about what you're trying to teach, but by playing you learn lessons that are applicable.
Now I'm working on a game that was originally just about managing personal cash flow, paying bills, earning money, etc. But that would be a boring game. So I pulled the dynamics out and then used familiar game mechanics together in a way that would express them in a more compressed and obvious form (the dynamics, not that it's about cash flow, would be obvious, and therefore lessons about them). The hope was originally that by playing the game, you'll realize good habits in managing your money.
Then thinking about Passage and The Marriage, they weren't just about modeling a system not usually modeled in games, they were modeling their perspective of it. And how it makes them feel. This personal touch and form of personal expression through *gameplay* is something that I don't think has been shown to be possible so obviously before. Miyamoto would talk about childhood experiences dictating feelings evoked, content, and metaphors used in his games, but never a direct expression through the rules of the game (that I can think of).
This lead me to the realization that I'm making a game about cash flow... Money, while important, has never been a ends to me. It's always been a means and I would never get it confused with anything else. But the "temporary meaning of life" in this game so far would be about money, and I didn't want that. In fact, ideally I'd want that to be a lesson of the game, that's it's only a means to an end that has more meaning.
So I decided to throw in a subgame that would be the real reason you'd want to do well in the money game. I decided to model it after my creative endeavors, things that take money, have the potential to make money, but usually never do. So I wanted this subgame to be creatively oriented. Maybe in contrast to the sort of fast-paced money game, it would be a slow problem solving game, and when you play it is up to you, but it does cost money to play it and you aren't making money while doing it.
Until last night I didn't know what exactly it would be. I thought maybe puzzles, but I couldn't find anything that was hard enough, easy enough to design myself (making puzzles seems hard!), or was even abstract enough to be in the middle of this game. Talking with Tim there was the point that creative games were usually more open ended. Yet I wanted some kind of even vague success metric. It can't just be "draw a picture" because not only would I not find that all that interesting, but it would be hard to do a success metric. But that was closer to what I wanted.
Late last night, combined with Rod Humble's Stars Over Half Moon Bay game about creativity, and then thinking about my childhood, I came up with something I was happy with: Building things with blocks. You get a set of blocks in various shapes... and you build something. It doesn't matter what, but given that you use all the blocks and they're all touching somehow, your success metric would be based on overall size and then symmetry. So grandeur and beauty. Your structure would be saved and somehow presented during the game, and over time you'd form a collection of them. If "good enough" you might get money from it. And you get a different set of points that are more valuable to the game as you're in this creative mode, but remember, it's a tradeoff because you can run out of money staying in it and then lose.
ANYWAY, the whole point of this post was not even going to be about this game because I haven't even started writing code yet. The point was that while I was sleeping last night after figuring this out, I was dreaming that I was in a situation where I was being pulled in a lot of different directions as far as how I could spend my time, but I was being pressed to work on a game. And in my dream I knew about this game I'm talking about, as well as another game I've been thinking about. But for some reason, I had to do a different game because these other ones meant too much to me... I wouldn't finish them fast enough (as it sometimes goes), and while doing so I'd learn how to better use the tech I wanted to use for the real games (in this case Flex/ActionScript).
There were a lot of random other dream things going on, but the fact that these things were so clear and so tied to reality was interesting. Now I think in the dream I was at Derek's house (since I was there last week for GDC) and I remember in the dream I kept thinking of some basic gameplay mechanic to do this simple project with. I remember playing with a few ideas, but I kept coming back to Aquaria and the mouse driven navigation. So at some point I realized (which is contrary to the point of the project) that I would make a fan game set in the world of Aquaria. I remember thinking about how I'd get the content, background art, etc, whether I should rip it from the game or convince Derek to give it to me. Then I realized I should worry about the art later. And then the character animations and I remember playing Aquaria thinking about how I'd want to implement various TINY details...
OH, and I just remembered, for some reason, a handful of other awesome indie game developers were there and we were together trying to find a game to work on. And I was trying to impress one of them because she's cute. ANYWAY, so I wanted to do this Aquaria mini game, but I didn't want to have to do all the content of an exploration game. I had the idea that if it were a more linear 2D sidescrolling platformer I could just throw some levels together (since this was an experiment after all). But how do I make Aquaria a 2D sidescroller like Mario? The main character is underwater... (obvious answer I didn't see in the dream: see underwater levels of Mario)
Then I got the idea that I really like the parts of the game where you were playing around near the surface and you could jump out of the water and stuff. You could even climb the cliffs a bit. I found that particularly compelling even though it wasn't really a major part of the game. So I thought, what if the game was a series of water and then land, with enemies and powerups only on land, so you'd be swimming in the water but you'd have to jump out onto land for a bit to progress and do anything interesting. And there would be larger pieces of land that might have pools of water that you could retreat to. And that did it for me.
I realize that sounds a bit silly, but it's not *that* silly and I went through the whole frustrating creative process and came up with a solution in a dream. There's only been 1 or 2 other times when I came up with something potentially useful in a dream, but this one included the annoying process too... and in the context of a real world-ish scenario. Not that I'm going to make this game, but... it just seemed noteworthy. But I'm sure the fact that I went through the process is because I've been thinking about it a lot, going through it myself, but also getting meta. Both of Rod Humble and Jason Rohrer's new games that I played recently are ABOUT the creative process. |
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