APD week9 - play & rules

Theme
Play and rules

Context
Bashi bashi champ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b-T_6gA5z4

When looking into rules in games, I came across a journal suggesting rules are not restrictions to the players, rather, they construct the possibility of the game (Tulloch, 2014). I thought this was quite interesting. Tulloch proposed that rules are productive forces to the game world. In Bashi bashi champ, the players have to push the buttons of the corresponding colors to eliminate the opponents. If there is no such rule, the game is meaningless and players have no idea what to do when they come to the game. These inspired me to create a game that players can contact with the objects with the same color of themselves, otherwise, they lose.

Method
The game is coded by C# in Unity. The UI components were created in Adobe Illustrator. The game is then uploaded to simmer.io. Background music of the video was downloaded from YouTube Audio Library for free.

Respond
Play "Get the Colours" here: https://simmer.io/@MargaretWong/~1e11309c-8479-1de0-884a-a310c5f17327

I went through the three waves of ideas again this week. Firstly, when we talk about rules, I think most of us will think of board games and card games. I was thinking of turning something not for play in our daily lives into games with the rules. For example, making use of the tiles on the ground to make a gameboard. Then, I had an idea of making a puzzle game that when the player is blue, they can pass through/ get in touch with the obstacles in blue otherwise they die. I thought this idea is interesting but when I went into the level design, I found that I was thinking in the old way to design the level. I was using the ideas of traps I studied in studio1. Therefore, I moved to the third wave of ideas of side-scrolling games with the colour-touching idea. There are some colour-changers if the players touch the objects with different colours from them, they die.

Reflection
Tulloch’s suggestion is the main inspiration for this project to make use of rules to create a game. For this game, it is “you can only touch objects of the same colour as you”.  On the other hand, I tried with the side-scrolling genre because I wanted to make a side-scrolling game last week but finally, I didn’t make one. I would like to try on coding for a side-scrolling game which is new to me.

However, it turned out not really work because it’s either too easy (the players won’t miss a jump) or impossible (when the player is in blue, a red cloud and a green box are coming up). I think these can be solved by better logic, e.g. when a “to red” box is generated, there must be a red box or cloud coming up. For the difficulty adjustment, the jumping dinosaur game from Chrome browser when there is no internet may be a good reference for me to study. I’m not sure how to make the player lose due to their improper control instead of because it’s impossible to jump over.

I looked for a solution to make a better side-scrolling game. In one of the tutorials for tips to code for platformer games. He suggested allowing the players to jump after a certain amount of time after they pressed the “jump” button to make the control feel more responsive. I saw and learnt the “check if the character is grounded method” from many many platformer tutorials. Yet, I feel that my character acts like what he said, not responsive to my control, I may give a try on this new method next time. He has also mentioned a very good point that there are already thousands of side-scrolling/ platform games, what would make your platform game stand out?

References
Tulloch, Rowan. "The Construction of Play: Rules, Restrictions, and the Repressive Hypothesis." Games and Culture 9.5 (2014): 335-50. Web.

5 Reasons Your Indie Platformer Game Sucks! (+Easy Fix!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFsJIrm2btU

13 More Tips for Making a Fun Platformer
http://devmag.org.za/2012/07/19/13-more-tips-for-making-a-fun-platformer/

Unity Moving objects with transform.Translate - Unity C# Scripting Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfIOPWuUjn8

Unity Tutorial How To Change Gameobjects Sprite In Sprite Renderer Component. Simple C# Script.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKoSfm4DTFc