Hole in the Ground

Tile Flip Puzzles

Planning Sketches

After spending some time planning out more complex mechanisms for surviving a tile flip, I went back and created prototypes of the easiest survival methods.  The first is simply walking to another tile.  I've added the idea of walking up to something in the world to get to the map view back into the prototype.  The map/landscape tile flip mechanic is faked for the time being (the landscape tile flips regardless of whether or not you've flipped the map tile).

The next one doesn't have a tile you can get to, but you can walk around the tile as it flips.  The white plane was added in because it's rather difficult to understand how the tile you're on is moving without a horizon to orient you. 

Working on these more simple survival strategies lead me to think about another way to walk from one tile to another:

Survival on a flipping tile

When thinking about how to improve the tile flip mechanic in the map view, I was considering choosing a constraint similar to the board game.  In the board game the player has a marker which can be moved only to certain spaces.  The spaces where the marker has been is always flipped.  For the video game, I was thinking that the marker could start on the tile where the player is, and be moved similarly.  However this would mean that every time the player goes into the map view, the tile the player is on will be flipped.  Which makes not falling off the tile a much bigger part of the game than it previously was.  This then lead me to think of the various ways to survive a tile flip.  One of the comments I've had repeated from players is that they would like to see the underside of the tile field.  So I created this simple prototype showing a possible "safe space" one might seek out after triggering a tile flip:

Here's what it looks like from a distance, so that you can see how it works:

Thumbnail Sketch

Book of Lenses

The main problem that I have with Schell's book is that he has a tenancy to occasionally get fairly unimportant things incorrect, which then throws everything that I don't have at least a bit of prior knowledge of into doubt.  The most egregious example of these mistakes is on page 117 where Schell makes the claim that we can understand line drawings because our brains draw lines around important objects.  In fact he says that "When we are presented with a picture already drawn with line, it has been 'pre-digested' in a sense, matching our internal modeling mechanism perfectly, and saving them a lot of work."

If you are interested in the actual reason that line drawings are understandable to us, there's a readable scientific paper on it here, but suffice it to say it has nothing to do with a tiny rotoscope artists in our heads. 

However there are many very useful insights in the Book of Lenses.  One that I found particularly helpful when developing a game board was the idea of thinking of a game space as a series of zero dimensional cells.  The below image is of two diagrams I created.  The left shows my first attempt, and the zero dimensional diagram of it, and the right is the revision I made.

Particularly because I am working with an irregular grid, it was difficult to see how the spaces related to one another.  Removing the extra dimensions made those relationships very clear and helped me to evaluate what I liked and didn't like about the design. 

One very interesting concept Schell discusses is the possibility for this type of diagramming to work with imaginary spaces.  For an example he shows a diagram of the game twenty questions.  One space is the mind of the answerer, another the mind of the questioner.  Another space, the conversation space, exists between the two.  I think this is a very interesting way to think about game spaces, and I would like to explore it farther.

Book of Lenses: Players

I will admit that considering my audience is one of my weak points as an artist.  I tend to find it very difficult to think about the audience without losing sight of what I'm trying to express which tends to make whatever I am working on into an incoherent mess.  So I was looking forward to the chapter on the player in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and was disappointed to find that it is mostly a discussion of demographics.  To make matters worse, the demographics are discussed in terms of fairly tired generalizations, and the chapter focuses a lot on the differences between male and female players.  There is a danger to focusing to much on the differences between male and female players. 

Men and women actually have much more in common than not.  The differences tend to stand out because they are so rare compared to the similarities.  Since those differences catch our attention so easily, there is an understandable tenancy to ascribe more importance to the differences than is wise.  Schell seems to fall into this trap.  While his points are not completely incorrect, he makes it sound like it is an impossible task to create a single game that will appeal to both men and women because the things men and women like in games are all polar opposites.  But clearly it is not impossible for games to appeal to both genders.  Schell even gives an example of how both boys and girls enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold experience at DisneyQuest.  Boys and girls may have had slightly different motivations for "blowing up bad guys" and slightly different style of play, but the game accommodated both with the same gameplay. This segment would have been much more interesting if it had focused on how to achieve that kind of gameplay, instead of making it seem like a hopeless task.

The one item in Schell's list of gender differences that I take issue with is the idea that female players shouldn't be given spatial puzzles.  While it is true that women on average have a harder time with spatial reasoning, as it turns out video games can actually help erase that problem.  Usually when we talk about the transformative quality of any particular media, we're talking about something intangible, but in this one case there is a transformative effect that has been scientifically studied.  That someone writing a book about game design presumably in order to influence the future of game design would discourage game designers from making spatial puzzle games that appeal to women seems very irresponsible to me. 

I thought it was interesting that the only demographics discussed in this chapter were age and gender.  Schell does mention that there are other ways to group people, and then talks briefly about psychographics.  Psychographics seem like they would be more helpful and nuanced.  However there's simply not much information about them. 

The chapter ends with a list of the types of pleasure one might find in a game.  The list is well thought out, and it has nice descriptions.  I feel like this is the part of the book where it should talk about catharsis, but it doesn't.  I'm not sure if I think catharsis should be included as a pleasure in itself; experiencing a tragic story is not always pleasant, but it can be cathartic and there is a sort of pleasure in that.  However from what I understand catharsis is also about relieving positive emotions, and therefore it could be the result of the pleasures in a game. 

First Person vs. Third Person

Throughout this quarter I've gone back and forth between first and third person controllers.  A third person controller feels very grounded in the space, which I feel is very helpful when the game-play tends more towards platformers.  You also get a better sense for who the character you're playing as is because you see them and their behaviors. 

However a first person controller has disembodied quality to it that I think shifts the player's focus to the space and exploration.  Although there are important platforming elements in this game, I believe the awareness of the environment and looking at it from different perspectives are more important elements.  For now I have settled on first person, but there is a possibility that may change again as the game develops.

A real landscape, finally

Astute observers might notice that the map and landscape tiles have their days and nights reversed.  That was in error and will be fixed in future iterations. 

The goal I had with this prototype was to start developing the look of the world again.  There are now two distinct sets of tiles for the first person and omniscient views (previously there were two cameras looking at the same set of tiles).  I would like to create map tiles with useful data about the landscape drawn on them, as opposed to the current generic pattern. 

The style of the landscape itself has evolved slightly from the very first project.  I have added a stronger bevel to the edges of each tile, which I feel emphasizes the seams between tiles.  The bevel also helped with getting the edges of the tiles to line up with each other in the Y direction. I'm undecided about lip where the river meets the edge of a tile.  The idea was the keep the continuity of the bevel and the edge height of the tiles.  However I think it's interrupting the line of the river too much. 

Beginning development of the 1st person view

Below is an early test of the physics system showing objects sliding off a tile as it flips.  I wanted to see how size, shape, and orientation effected the motion of the objects.  I like the way the cylinder standing on its end falls over, and how the larger sphere gets caught by the neighboring tile before falling off. 

Next I added in the first person controller and the camera swap script from my earlier prototype.  The objects were not included, and more tiles were used overall to get a sense of how the world might look with ghosted tiles.

Then the physics objects were integrated with the first person/omniscient view swapping.  A new method for revealing tiles based on activating neighboring tiles was added as well.  This is probably the first prototype that has a couple different rotation rates.  The small tile that flips near the end of the screen capture turns quickly enough to actually fling a sphere up and onto the other side of the tile.  The larger tiles turn slowly and everything tumbles down.

There's a strange glitch where you sometimes see through a tile to an adjacent tile.  This was solved later when the Maya models replaced the Unity cubes.