Comments on: P3: Banana Surfing

By: Yan Xu

Yan Xu — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:30:39 +0000

The game control you proposed plays with the balance between losing and gaining control. This has potential to become the “flow” type of game, engaging players and motivating them to play again and again to increase their skill level.

Here are a few things that you may want to think about when prototyping:

– Spend time experimenting with the mapping between the key control and different aspects of character movement, such as acceleration, velocity, jumping, tilting, timing, etc. Find the “natural mappings” that are easy to learn and hard to master.

– How to support players feeling that they can always improve their skills by playing your game more? What kind of skills do you want players to master? This is important for the replayability of your game.

– What are the things that players do not have control of? Your game will have an nice inherent rhythm, switching between moments of enjoying the wind to moments of high concentration. Interlace them smartly to avoid frustration or boredom. This article by the designer of the game flow and flower may be useful to you: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/courses/csu670/sp09/resources/p31-chen-flow-in-games.pdf

By: Blair MacIntyre

Blair MacIntyre — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:55:22 +0000

One more thing: you might consider switching to a game controller. They should work with the Unity Web player, and the analog thumbsticks would be a WAY better control device for this.

By: Blair MacIntyre

Blair MacIntyre — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:50:59 +0000

This has some nice potential. Makes me think of things like:
-having the motion feel like sliding (surfing, skateboarding) will be key, and will be the challenge
-think about having it be possible to jump over things and have the banana slide under them (e.g., shopping carts) so you can stay in the flow even if you can’t avoid obstacles. Perhaps the banana slows with the player making them lose speed a bit, but not totally
-similarly, you should be able to time jumps to go over something and land on bananas to keep going
-a banana should get less slippery with time (perhaps it degrades, so it’s better to jump to new ones a lot)
-Perhaps make them have to jump to new ones, just just bump into them, to keep sliding (e.g., you need to “land” on a banana to release it’s slippery goodness!)
-there are lots of things you can do when you hit the wall that you should htink about (slow down, spin, bounce to the other way)
-and, of course you may eventually want to let them go up on the wall (ala skateboarding/snowboarding). The grocery store as “snowboarding half pipe”?