GBGames

This month’s One Game a Month entry is probably the one I put the least effort toward. I worked around 7 hours on it.

Download Eye Contact for Linux 64-bit (362 kb tar.gz file)

August was a hectic month for me. My wife and I closed on a new house, which meant that most of my “spare” time was spent preparing the house and getting ready to move.

The theme for August was “Philosophy”, and I had originally envisioned a game about making eye contact with strangers.

I wanted to have a very dark room, so you could only see yourself and your immediate surroundings. You can tell where the other people are because their eyes would be the only visible feature, similar to what cartoons did to show people walking around in dark rooms.

I wanted the eyes to be incredibly expressive. They should communicate attraction, danger, and sadness.

I thought that the goal of the game would be for the player to navigate a room, avoiding eye contact with dangerous and creepy strangers while trying to make eye contact with a potential romantic partner.

As you got closer to other people, you would see features besides their eyes: skin color, nose shapes, weight, etc.

And these other features wouldn’t matter at all.

That is, you might find that the potential romantic partner is not someone you might normally be attracted to in real life.

But with even less time to work on the game than normal, I had to scrap most of this design. I kept they eye contact idea, though, and I am pleased with what I came up with.

I started with an eye that the player controlled, but eventually I realized that for the game I was creating, there was no reason for the player to be an eyeball. It was too confusing when you couldn’t easily tell your character apart.

I made the eyeball a “guardian”, rotating around while the player tried to pick up squares in the area. When the guardian spotted the player, it would freeze for a second, then shoot towards the location. If the player touched a guardian, it was game over.

To add challenge, when a guardian shoots off toward the player, it would also leave behind a clone, so now there were two guardians looking for the player.

As you can see above, the game got exponentially difficult.

So I made one more change:

When smaller guardians touched, they combined into a larger guardian which constantly chased the player. This change solved the issue of too many multiplying guardians while also providing a different challenge to the player.

Finally, I made the pick up item look significantly different. A white box in a sea of eyeballs didn’t stand out enough, so I made it the same color as the player and also pulsated it. The animation made it stand out nicely.

I would have liked to have added a third type of challenging guardian, or added some way for the player to remove guardians. I would have also added sound effects and particle effects, but I ran out of time.

Despite not having a lot of time to dedicate to it, I really like Eye Contact. It’s one of my favorite #1GAM entries. There is something disconcerting about all of these eyes looking for you.

I’ve been working on Shipwrecked since June. Even then I realized that it was very ambitious, but rather that continue to work on it throughout the rest of the year, I’m going to call what I have done and move on.

Download Shipwrecked for Linux 64-bit (562 kb tar.gz file)

It’s amazing what a deadline can do to productivity, though. In the last few days of the month, I managed to add the ability to create objects, sleep, and go fishing.

I created a number of new objects, including sharp rocks, fishing poles, and opened coconuts.

The crafting screen tells you what you can make and what you need in order to make it.

Fishing doesn’t work quite as well as I’d like.

It’s too easy! Fish seem to sail onto shore for you, and I would rather it be more difficult, requiring patience and time.

If I had more time to develop this game, I know of a number of things I wanted to add:

• Daily stamina, which reduces as you take actions, such as walking with heavy items or swimming, and requires rest to recover. Right now, sleeping simply fast-forwards time.
• Food spoilage.
• Encumbrance. I added weights to the objects, but the player can still carry an unlimited amount. I would like it if swimming was more difficult with too many items, for instance, so drowning is more likely.
• Disease.
• Weather, such as extreme heat, rain, and bad storms.
• Other entities, such as sharks to pose as water hazards and crabs to be dangerous food sources.
• Injuries.
• Thirst.
• Caves to explore.
• Debris, such as crates floating to shore from presumably sunk ships. Suddenly life on the island is more interesting when combing the beach results in finding bottles of wine or magazines.
• Morale and sanity. I had a vision of the player going insane the longer he/she survives. Insanity would manifest as coconuts being the heads of people walking around the island, for instance, or objects such as rocks suddenly being seen as edible.

I took cues from Harvest Moon and NetHack primarily, plus I always liked the book Robinson Crusoe.

I learned that surviving on a desert island is a very common theme in games. For example, Stranded by Unreal Software was released in 2003.

Most recently there is Wayward, and when I learned of it, I almost lost motivation to continue work. Here was a game that was a very in-depth, turn-based version of what I wanted to make, although I had no intentions of adding bears and giant spiders.

I also felt bad because I realized that I needed to provide a way to create objects, and adding a crafting element to the game made me feel like I was copying the big trend since Minecraft became famous. It seems as if every aspiring indie game developer is making a procedurally-generated world in which you have to use nearby resources to survive.

As for this game, despite working on it for almost 50 hours across two months, I’m afraid it doesn’t have a lot of depth. The island has its objects randomly generated within it, but it’s not a very interesting algorithm. I would have liked to have created an expansive island to explore, with jungles and cliffs, but for now, the island is populated with random trees, boulders, shells, branches (where are the trees that made those?), and empty nets.

Of course, it’s only 50 hours. I’m sure if I worked on it full time in a given month, I could have accomplished much more, and if I dedicate multiple months to working on it, I could have something richer.

So on that note, I got quite a bit accomplished for this project. B-)

What I learned, however, is that even if I have plans for a lot of inter-dependent systems in a game, I should implement one to completion before moving on to another. It took way too long after I coded in a system for hunger and starvation for the player to have a way to avoid such a death, for instance. If I added hunger, I should have added food right away. In a similar way, I created a lean-to because I had plans for a need for shelter, but I never did put in any reason for a shelter to exist. A number of items become merely ornamental as a result.

All that said, I really enjoyed making this project. I hope I come back to it in the future and flesh it out more fully.

In my last update, the player can pick up items.

Shortly after, I made it so you can also drop items arbitrarily, which means now players can properly propose with this game:

Next on my task list was to create an inventory management system. I wanted the player to be able to equip arbitrary items and not just the one that was picked up first.

But of course, first I needed to create items to collect.

That screenshot above shows a tree branch (clearly not from the coconut trees), a seashell, an empty net, a fish, a rock, and a coconut. Nearby are the coconut tree and boulder.

I want the player to be able to combine items together in useful ways. I don’t want a full-blown crafting system, but some way to fabricate useful tools out of other useful tools. An example of what I want is a lean-to made out of branches:

Darn desert island IKEA furniture. There’s always one piece left over…

Another new part of the game is that you can shake coconut trees. If they have any coconuts, they fall out.

Well, they don’t animate yet, so a coconut appears wherever the player is.

What else can fall out of a coconut tree? Tarantulas, to add some risk?

Any bags or netting can also be shook to release items, although not yet.

What’s next? Eating would be nice. I can’t believe it is the middle of the month and there’s no nutritional content to this game yet.

And then the inventory system.