3Colors Dev

The Hacker portion of the Co-Signers needs some serious work. Click-and-capture node after node is pretty boring, regardless of how he interacts with the Thief. Since the Summer started, the design team has really had some time to ponder over the elevated emotional states graph that I put into my last two posts. We've come up with one particularly awesome solution that addresses every level of the graph, makes the gameplay less boring than mud, fits into the visual aesthetic of the game, explores our thesis statement further than before, and doesn't interfere with the current Hacker-Thief dynamic that's core to the game.

That solution is for another post. To get there, we pitched dozens of ideas back and forth to come up with mechanics that fit all those things. Lots of ideas were generated and rejected for not filling one or several of these categories. Some of them were really cool, and one of those is what I want to talk about.

Initially, this was a solution to allow for the hacker to get to various points on the board while frustrating what combination of nodes the hacker can or can't capture. It was scrapped for requiring too much focus on the Hacker's side, which would distract him from the dual game he had going with the Thief, among other technical issues. The idea is that the entire board would consist of interconnected, multi-colored nodes--some of which would be key points that the Hacker would have to capture. However, only a certain number of color combinations would be available to him, and they wouldn't always point to the direction that the Hacker wanted to go. This was too distracting for the gameplay that we were looking for, but a cool idea for a small iOS game was there.

Tuesday I spent a good three hours trying to design this solo and came up with several ideas, none of which were great. When this became its own game, the inherent goals of the game were removed, because there's no reason to capture discrete points if there's nothing that you can do with them once you own them. Furthermore, I wanted to make sure that this game was really simple--not only to make the scope small, but to make the play experience simple and rewarding.

Some of the ideas were things like trying to capture rows or columns, trying to capture all points before they scrolled off the screen, trying to capture key circles, trying to capture everything within the time limit, and trying to capture things before they changed colors. All these ideas fell short, for various reasons that I might go into later. Whats important is that I put in a lot of time, had nothing, and was really frustrated that none of the ideas that I came up with were working.

Yesterday I talked to Zac Trustcott about my woes and we pitched ideas back and forth for a bit. Not five minutes into this, I came upon an idea that really sang. The idea is to capture everything on the board, but any time you capture a circle you've already captured, it becomes un-captured and changes to a random color. You still have the bank of color combinations to choose from, and it eliminates the swipe-spamming problem that was prevalent in other versions of the game. In lieu of a design document, I took a page out of Chris Rawson's book and made an animatic for it:

The game starts the player out on a distinct point--in this case, its the upper left corner of the map (the animation doesn't show this at all). The player begins to capture circles by holding down and swiping across colored circles, trying to match them up with one of the random combinations on the left of the screen. The player has to start his swipe on a circle that is either already captured or next to one that is already captured. If the player ever successfully captures a node that is already captured, the node becomes un-captured and changes colors.

Its a low-enough scoped game that we should be able to build it over the summer, and fun enough that it should be really awesome. The moral of this story is that time spent into development is never wasted, even if you come up with nothing. Talking with people after putting in effort can provide the spark that allows all those ideas to come to fruition.

Now, its time for the first meeting to start building this. I need to come up with a wrapper...