Too little too late

Toward the last week of the project I thought about the visual design, and wondered if there wasn't another theme we could attach to the game, or a different way to use the mechanic we were coming up with. I landed on an idea called Matter Maker.

In this game you would rotate a molecular chamber collecting atomic particles to make atoms and molecules. With one of the guns you could attract electrons, with another you could attract protons, and with a third you could attract neutrons. You would combine these particles to make atoms. I called it matter maker and concepted up this artwork:

I proposed this to my team members who all thought it was a good idea, but we all agreed it was too late to make those changes.

Thoughts on Entropy

The prototype itself looked ok. The art was nice, I didn't understand why the celtic knots were the major theme, and how they related to anything, but it all looked nice enough. I also felt the different weapons were arbitrary because they were automatically fired if the cursor was in the quarter of the screen where the guns were. To me it didn't really matter which gun fired which ammo, cause you were only concerned with destroying the projectiles. It was a game that I played for 45 seconds or so, then put the controller down. I felt I understood everything it was intended to be, and it just wasn't fun to me. It felt like we failed to find the fun early enough.

Entropy

When I got back from California this was pretty close to the prototype we turned in. As you can see the art style that they had chosen was a celtic knot design. The idea was an order vs. chaos idea. If the enemy ships hit you, your planet would devolve into chaos. The celtic knots represented order.

Forgot Something

One thing of note about this prototype is the discussions we had getting to our idea. After Tron was shot down, and we pivoted to Missile Command, our teachers had us choose a theme other than spaceships and outer space - for good reason, it's a bit overdone.

We sat down and discussed some themes and ideas, and pretty soon came to an idea of aliens coming to a planet and the player choosing to let them in or not. Some members of our team wanted to make a game about immigration. And the player would choose which aliens or which spaceships we allowed into our planet.

This conversation pretty quickly made me uncomfortable. I'm all for making a serious game that makes a strong editorial point, or discusses a topical issue that either proposes possible solutions or shows the player the complexity of a situation. But the design we started talking about was having the player choose which alien races they would allow on the planet, and which he would reject and shoot down. We would determine this based on the shape of the spaceship, or some other characteristic. To me this approach felt very discriminatory and even racist. We talked about immigration, and people's political views on the subject started emerging. This was fine, as we're in an environment where we should be able to freely discuss these viewpoints.

I had some philosophical disagreements with some of the premises that people were building the design on. My fundamental argument was that our immigration policy is not working, and it's not a system that is very good at deciding who we should let into our country and who we shouldn't. That it's impossible to know which individuals would contribute positively to your society, and which would have a negative impact. And even more complexly, which of a person's descendants would contribute positively or negatively. In our game we disagreed about the proper way to select which immigrants we let in, and which we should turn away. It made me want to study more about immigration, because I'd like to know when we started limiting immigration in the first place, what were the reasons and criteria for it, and how has it evolved over the years. 

I was happy building a game that discussed this topic, I just felt our design wasn't saying anything positive or constructive, but was just promoting the player to be discriminatory and racist. I suggested building randomness into the enemy ships so that the player didn't actually know which ships were good for the planet and which ships would harm it. In my opinion this would show the ineffectiveness and truth or our system, that it's very difficult to judge which individual should be allowed in the country. This idea was quickly shot down because such randomness would frustrate the player quickly. Which I thought made for a good statement. While this might be true, it also made for a lousy game. So we moved on.

We conitnued to discuss the merits of such a game and it's design, until a member on our team had the clear-mindedness to ask if we were sacrificing the fun of the game to force a political statement into it. And we all agreed we should probably just make a fun game.

After this I let them know I was going to California for a vacation and would be back within a week. When I would return I would find their design and art style pretty settled on a game we would call Entropy.

Missile Command

The spin we decided to take on this classic game was to locate the missiles on a rotating planet instead of a stationary horizon. There would be different types of missiles that shot different bullets. You could rotate the planet to put the missiles where you needed them. Here's some early concept I did:

Prototype 2

The assignment for our second prototype was to take a classic old school game that had a joystick and one button mechanic, and modify it by changing the mechanic, or rules of the game. The end prototype could still only use one joystick and one button.

The games we talked about were Asteroids, Tron, Missile Command, and a few others. We came up with a few ideas for Asteroids and Tron. No one was too thrilled with Asteroids, even though it was my personal favorite, as I played it a lot as a kid during a small window in my life.

We started proceeding with Tron, and I thought we were coming up with good ideas. When we pitched it to our professors however they let us know it wouldn't work for a reason I can't remember now. (shows you the importance of not procrastinating your production journal) So we decided on Missile Command.


This is a game where you move your cursor to intercept and shoot down missiles before they destroy your cities.

Paddlebash Summary

Overall, this first prototype was a great experience, I couldn't have asked for a better one. The team was great. We gelled quickly and kept that chemistry throughout the project. It was fun working with bright talented individuals who moved quickly and came up with great ideas and great work. While we constantly looked for better ways to do things, we never strayed too far from a coherent vision that we all agreed with. For me it was a great experience.