Because I have deep-seeded mental issues and sometimes am prone to crazy bouts of productivity, I made a new video game (click to play!):

Much like Balance, Doubt was done in under a week using Unity and an entirely particle-driven visual aesthetic. Since the last couple of games I’ve worked on (Magnetic Butterfly and Balance) were somewhat passive in their mechanics and heavily based on physics and movement, I wanted to do a game that allowed for somewhat more active play. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for shooters (both to make and play), but I knew that I didn’t want to make a straight-up shooter. My goal with these week-long projects is to experiment and, along those lines, I wanted to try something slightly different. So was born the ring-based movement mechanism and the “sticky” bullets.

Something I felt worked very well with Balance, from the perspective of someone who knew everything about the game and the influences anyway, was the thematic and inspirational influences in the core gameplay and game flow. For me, Balance worked out as a means of telling a short story through gameplay. What I’m still not entirely sure about is what other people took from the game (if anything), so going on to the next project I wanted to try something a bit more commonly understood. Originally, I wanted to do something more holiday-themed (which is where this image came from), but nothing came out of my gameplay sketches. Then, for whatever reason, the concept of ‘doubt’ entered my head and everything else fell in place shortly thereafter.

My favorite aspect of Balance was the evolution of the game’s aesthetic and the effectiveness of the final result both as an atmospheric and purely visual quality of the game. The particle system-heavy visual style was something that was incredibly enjoyable for me to work on and mess around with and, on top of that, it was an incredibly quick way to get good results in the game (and tweaking them was even easier). Beyond all those points, though, it seems that the biggest benefit of this visual style is the “ink blot” approach to graphic style and design; it allows the game to have dynamic, readily identifiable components that create a very interpretive overall composition. Potentially, what I read from Balance and Doubt is completely different from what someone else may read from it despite so many common atmospheric elements. I’m planning on doing at least two or three more projects in the future which attempt to take the visual style further (and in somewhat different directions).

One thing which has always worked out incredibly well for me is constantly getting friends and colleagues to play-test early builds of the games I work on. Magnetic Butterfly would have been a far, far, far worse game if I didn’t constantly get people’s thoughts on player movement and interaction. Balance’s play-tests also led to a vastly improved movement design. Feedback to Doubt, though, led to two huge changes to the initial design. One of which is that in previous builds, player’s bullets would stick indefinitely to the pegs surrounding the cloud and then a player would have to “detonate” them with a separate interaction. The theory of this was that it would allow players to setup large combo chains which could yield big points and more damage to the doubt cloud. I could never figure out a good risk/reward for this system, though, and the additional button press felt awkward. When a colleague pointed this out, I had a partial epiphany that led to the player only shooting shots that, once stuck to a peg, were on a definite timer before their eventual explosion. Any further pegs that were stuck were dependent on the timer of that first bullet to get a real combo going. While still not entirely ideal (as there’s no reason not to be constantly shooting now), this was a definite step in the right direction for the game.

And, similar to Balance, all builds of Doubt up until the second to last one shared a common misstep (that I still failed to properly remedy): the full width of mechanics which make up the game are still largely non-apparent. Play-testers of Doubt were often confused as to what exactly was “good” to do and what was “bad.” Somewhat hackishly, my response to this was to add floating point notifiers that appeared on-screen whenever an action was executed which resulted in a change of score. Much to my surprise, this actually seems to have worked out pretty well.

Overall, Doubt was a fun project to work on, but I think Balance turned out much better. When I started Doubt, I didn’t have the same focus and clear intent as far as my gameplay and thematic goals when I started and, despite finding them eventually, I think that lack of clarity hurt. I also don’t feel that Doubt is all that deep or fun; there’s no real “strategy” to form. It’s very possible to just hold down left/right and the fire button and end up with a decent score. The one-button game with completely random potentially movement areas somehow required more attention and care to play than the one with full player agency. Still, it was a lot of fun to work on and the one-week limitation worked out well.

Also, thanks for all the feedback and support regarding Balance; it’s incredibly appreciated and all your awesome feedback has given me a lot of insight into what to do (and what to avoid) in the future. And let’s give a big high-five to Josh Sutphin for yet another set of rad music!