Context

The game concept my team and I are developing features a cone of light that reveals elements of the game world as its core mechanic. In the original concept the cone originates from the player’s avatar and and rotate automatically and the player can toggle this spot light on and off. In addition a halo of light surrounds the player, extending over a shorter distance than the light cone. Having the light cone on also depletes the player ship’s battery, and running out of power incurs a game over. The idea behind this mechanic was likely to add an element of resource management. Our group, for the time being implemented the mechanic as is and we started seeing some of the weaknesses of this mechanic, as well as conflict with our own design choice.

Salt water fish put in a clear water tank

I brought up this difference between the original concept document and our implementation. We felt that having the word scroll automatically around the player would go against the aesthetic of mystery that the concept aimed for, therefore, we choose to have the player be able to move in every direction and potentially get lost .An additional, and significant change is that in the original concept, the light cone revealed what a threat was, the player could see a shadow in the fog . In our implementation, the light cone actually reveals the presence of threat(aside from rocks, which are always visible). The rational for it was that in a simple game like this one, the player would not really care about the exact nature of the threat and would simply shoot it on sight (a prediction that turned out to be accurate). In the end that made our light cone the prime navigational tool for the player and they cannot see most of the threat without it (and allowing them to do so, outside of a limited time powerup, would make the mechanic serve no purpose). The consequences of this make the original light cone mechanic unfit for our game and are twofold.

First, if the player turn it off for any meaningful period of time they will run into an unseen obstacle; the navigational challenge encourages the player to never turn the light off (or progress very slowly, using the short range halo). One solution is to have a way to recharge the battery without turning the light off. Pickups would be unsatisfactory, because it would encourage the player to run from pickup to pickup which clashes with the relatively slow pace we think works best for this game. Rewarding battery time for shooting enemies would be even worse and would make the game about something its not. The best solution, in my opinion, and the one that would preserve the aesthetic of the game is to suppress the battery limitation completely so the player can wander for a while without incurring game over.

Second, having the light rotate around by itself in the context of a navigational challenge can lead to some situation when the player is not sure what is in front of them. It could appear acceptable, if in practice the player did not tend to simply wait for the light to complete a turn before proceeding (This problem may solve itself once regular enemy spawn is implemented). The obvious solution would be to give the player some measure of direct control over the orientation of the light cone, and we will certainly try that.

Conclusion

Implementing the light cone in a mechanically satisfying way has revealed itself to be a challenging task, which to this date remains unsolved. Our hope is that the right way to implement it will become more obvious when the rest of the game is implemented in a coherent fashion. A second order of work is implementing this light cone in an aesthetically pleasing way, which will probably the subject of a future post.

About Nicolas Basil Gerard

2017 Programming

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