Smoke and Mirrors and Global Game Jam

Over the weekend, Stephanie, Rose, Arim, Jake, and I decided to participate in this crazy thing called a Game Jam. It’s essentially a hackathon, but for games. I’ve had no prior experience, so this 43 hour thing was new to me, and at the same time I was — somehow — expecting to finish it fast enough so I could still get a healthy amount sleep… They call me ambitious.

We managed to make “Smoke and Mirrors“, a puzzle platformer that turns the trope of princesses being rescued from towers on its head.

Fittingly, our mechanic challenges our usual way of approaching a platformer as well — by featuring a couple of princesses who are controlled by the same keys, but who either move in the same or opposite directions depending on what mode they are in.

In order of narrative coherence, then, the more important lessons I learnt:

1. My teammates wanted a save point, but I kept pushing it down the priority list. It came down to me preferring to add another sound than to implement the save point. “Just make them restart the level, ” I thought. “It’s a rogue-like game!” I thought. “It’s not even long!” I thought.

Obviously this became one of the biggest issues during the jam showcase. People would genuinely want to play the game, but not want to have to restart after dying. To make things worse,

2. It did not feel nice to move and jump in our platformer.

One problem I had already encountered in a previous game was that characters would tend to ‘stick’ to walls if players continued holding down the arrow keys, and not slide down due to gravity as they should. I didn’t know how big an issue that was, possibly because I did not try that game too much before the problem was resolved by my other programmer. So it wasn’t like I didn’t know the solution to that problem (which, if you’re interested, is to put a frictionless physics material to the characters’ and platforms’ colliders), it was that I didn’t know how big the problem was to do it.

What happened with the sticky sides of platforms or walls was that it was hard to jump. You had to be very precise in your jumps; just a slight overestimation would cause the side of your princess to collide with the wall, and hence eventually fall to the ground when the arrow button was released. This was intensely frustrating for the players.

This and the first lesson could have been discovered, of course, if I had just

3. Fucking playtested.

And I mean this not just with other people, but most importantly with myself.

I know this has been said so many times, but I was so engrossed in trying to make everything work that I kept pushing it back, or thinking that Stephanie would play it and tell me if anything was wrong as she was putting the level together. In the first lesson my teammates were trying to tell me that they thought it was important, but I just didn’t think so, because I had not encountered first hand for myself how frustrating it was to play through the whole game, especially with the not very graceful movement of our characters. If I had just duplicated the scene periodically and tried it myself, I would have noted down these things, and pushed them up the priority list.

I guess these are the things I hit myself over the head with. Of course our game had a couple more bugs — ladders especially were terrible, and there was a bug in the boss level that enabled players to win the game by just hitting one instead of two switches – but these are more specific problems that time wouldn’t have allowed us to discover and resolve in the duration of the jam.

The judges’ playtesting process was pretty irritating, I would say. It turns out that cutscenes and puzzle platformers aren’t the best things to show to judges; our judges skipped our cutscene immediately (much to the wrath of Arim, our artist who stayed up through the night to make it), and could not even get past the tutorial level. Everyone else who played our game got past the tutorial level, at the very least. Were they daunted by not being able to figure it out, and so did not try too hard? Did they try? Was it the time pressure of having the judging process already overstretched by 2 hours that weighed down on their ability to think? These are questions whose answers we’d never know. What we do know, however, is that the only thing they managed to achieve in our game is to use the arrow keys to move. At least they managed to follow that instruction?

This is as far as they got. The right green switch that you see Ruby, our orange princess, on, controls a nifty platform on the left which would otherwise block Sapphire, our blue princess, from dropping down to the second floor. The ‘Shift’ instruction we are displaying causes them to switch to mirror mode, which means that Ruby would walk in the direction of the arrow key pressed, while Sapphire would walk in the opposite direction. Can you figure out what the judges couldn’t?

Anyway, global game jam was a great experience which allowed me to generate many ideas during the brainstorming process that I’d love to develop in time to come. If I had one gripe, though, it is — don’t advertise 48 hours if we’re supposed to be done in 43! That is all.

To watch a video of it (and spoil yourself), head over to this link.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife

I like to think I can be one of those ad-hoc surgeons they find in an emergency say on a plane after playing Trauma Center, but unfortunately I don’t have any of the surgical tools they conveniently provide for every operation in the game, so I won’t be operating on anyone anytime soon. Also, there is just the possibility that there won’t be dotted lines for me to trace on an actual human body, but let’s not think of the worst case scenarios, shall we?

This is the first time I’ve played any game in the Trauma Center series. This is a DS game, and for those unfamiliar with the capabilities of the DS, it has 2 screens, the bottom of which is touchscreen. You can probably guess which is the screen the operations are performed on. Using the stylus, you perform a variety of tasks related to cutting a person open, burning their parts with laser and frantically trying to salvage their rapidly declining vitals before they, you know, die have to be saved by a presumably more expert team of doctors.

Something I like about Trauma Center is that each operation is kept short, with a maximum time limit of 5 minutes per operation. This means that as the game progresses, the difficulty level cannot be increased by simply making operations longer and more tedious — it forces level designers to condense their design and think of more creative ways to sustain interest.

There’s an obvious pattern in the game, where an operation where they teach you new techniques is followed by a few similar operations where they don’t give you guidance. This is largely enjoyable, allowing the player to feel a growing sense of mastery, especially when operations in later chapters develop these techniques further.

The learning process itself, however, is frustrating. Learning comes in the form of your very own personal nurse (obviously female and pretty), who delivers instructions in condensed one liners. These one liners are often not comprehended by me. At the start of the game it was more often “Use the suture and stitch him back up”, which was confusing as all the tools were just silhouettes on the sides of the screen. As the game progresses and I get a better knowledge of which tools are called what, the designers have introduced tasks with strategic elements which are explained poorly perhaps because of their brevity, causing me to have to turn to walkthroughs just to get a better understanding of what was said.

But but which one is the draining tool???

Another frustration is that the delivery of the one-liners can sometimes be in the middle of the operation, which pauses time and resets the tool you are holding, and which you have to press a button in order to progress past. Since my fingers are wrapped around my stylus, it breaks the flow of the game to have to press a physical button; I’d have preferred a virtual button on the screen.

Certain operations are also not fun to go through. For example, the stage I am currently stuck at has me trying to remove “Triti” patches from a patient’s organ — except these patches keep re-growing. This race for speed turns out to be quite a chore as I find myself removing the same patches, over and over again.

Trauma Center has been trying to teach us this all along.

Digressing from the game design to talk about the sociological slant — the main character of the game is a male doctor who starts off as being a complete slacker, ignorant of what to do and careless in his treatment. At every point of the game he is guided by a female companion, who is often a nurse. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous points of the story was when there was a bomb threat, and his fellow female doctor decides they should be the heroes to detonate the bomb — she assures him that her knowledge of bomb detonation is sound, then orders him to do the job while she assists from the side. Story-wise, it makes no sense that these female companions have superior knowledge of the operations, but end up merely assisting instead of carrying out the work themselves. Like a certain remake of Harry Potter starring Hermione as the main character, the main character in this case seems to have gotten to where he is from pure privilege… But I’m probably opening myself up to rape threats from #gamergaters.

“They ruin everything!!!”

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the game, with its many uses of the stylus on the touchscreen, as well as the story segments which provide a refreshing break in between operations.