Kind of a blunt way to put it, but I’m blunt like a used pencil.
Steam currently has some fantastic deals running, and so I picked up some great looking games: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Gratuitous Space Battles, Altitude, Trine, World of Goo, and Braid. As I played through them, I started doing what I always do, which is to jot down some great design choices they made, and some bad ones. Here are the results of my investigative analysis, starting with the first two listed games.
### AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity ###
Dejobaan Games (http://www.dejobaan.com/)
Available on Steam
Out of all of these games, this is my favorite. It is, as far as I know, a truly unique game design. The basic premise is that in the future, buildings float, leading to some truly gnarly base jumping. You spend the whole game looking down as you fall, trying to score points by accumulating kisses (getting close to buildings), hugs (spending time close to buildings), giving the thumbs up to your fans and flipping the bird to your detractors, and spraying graffiti on government municipal buildings. At the end of each level is a landing pad, on which you must deploy your balded parachute and land safely.
Depending on how well you do in each level, you receive a certain number of Teeth (I know, weird) numbering in the thousands. You use these teeth to unlock new levels, videos, and tools.
#### The Good ####
1. The level design is fantastic, because it fits the theme, and as far as I can tell, doesn’t require any unique models to be created – just buildings, which I assume can be custom created in the level builder using simple geometry. Genius – what a fantastic way to integrate a great game design premise while keeping the number of assets minimal.
2. The humor is great, for me, and personal. Pasted throughout each level are pictures of the dev team, historical pictures with quotes, and other random humor. These pictures are all pretty wacky, and convey a sense of surrealism while playing. Not only does this make me want to keep playing, to find new billboards with pictures, but it also gives me a chuckle during a level that I might otherwise not care about. These assets probably cost $100 in man-hours to create. Extremely cheap bang for the buck.
#### The Bad ####
1. The in-level interface is worthless for gameplay. Around your view is a speed indicator and a proximity detector. These two indicators are useless, as speed appears relative (spread out maps and higher speed would appear the same as crowded maps and slower speed), and if you take the time to look at the proximity detector you are probably going to hit something anyways. Plus, the whole point of the game is to skim close to objects for extra points, so you are constantly in close proximity to objects, rendering the detector rather useless.
#### Other Stuff ####
Between levels when you are choosing what level to unlock next, there is occasionally a deadpan, depressed newscaster named Devon who delivers what I believe to be some of the most entertaining filler content of all time.
#### The Takeaway ####
The score based gameplay is quite interesting. With Kung Fu Kingdom we intend to make levels become harder the longer you play them (no more “I’m super powerful now… this is boring” nonsense). Similar to AAAaaaaaAAAAHHH, this provides incentive for the player to replay levels, just to see how long they can last. Perhaps we could implement a type of scoreboard system, where how long you last in a level is compared with other players online.
### Gratuitous Space Battles ###
Positech Games (http://positech.co.uk/)
Available on Steam
The name says it all. Instead of controlling ships during combat, the player is responsible for constructing ships (out of different hull and module types), setting up their pre-battle formation, assigning them different engagement rules, and then hitting play. The player then gets to watch their fleet duke it out with the enemy in what is similar to a sci-fi movie with lots of special effects.
#### The Good ####
1. Focuses on overall strategy – the preparation and the broad decisions of what to do in combat.
2. A plethora of options provide the player with ample opportunity to experiment with different ship types and strategies.
3. Unlock-able modules allow the player to customize what new equipment they have access to based on their play type.
#### The Bad ####
1. The battles themselves are pretty, but overall boring, since there is nothing you can do during battle to affect the outcome.
2. Gameplay almost always boils down to trial and error. “Try missile cruisers this time. Oh, they have anti-missile defenses, I guess I’ll use beam weapons instead.” etc. This means that knowledge of strategy is much less important than module knowledge and how the modules rock-paper-scissor together.
#### The Takeaway ####
1. GSB allows the user to set some simple rules for each ship, like “Vulture”, which causes the ship to always attack the enemy with the lowest health, or “Co-operative” which causes it to attack ships other ships are targeting. This could be very useful in Kung Fu Kingdom, and is a feature we had roughly slated for implementation, but had not fully designed yet.
2. No matter how entertaining the rest of the game is, if the player cannot act at all during specific battles, the game designer needs to make sure that those battles are either short enough to avoid boredom, or are part of an overall game design instead of its focus.