Ben James :: adventures in gaming

This is an idea I had a few weeks ago, mostly inspired by the wonderful game Katamari Damacy. I thought it could be a good idea to simplify the base concept into a simple 2D game.

I started with the basic idea that you can consume circles which are larger than you, and are damaged by those larger than you. Here’s my first draft, use the arrow keys to move.

You probably noticed that this by itself is not particularly fun; you quickly become either quite large or quite small, and that’s pretty much the end of the game. (I didn’t bother putting in win/lose conditions for the prototype, but you can imagine what they would be)

So, what’s the next step? Well, let’s test out my list of ingredients. We’ve obviously hit the first mark: the game is quite simple. Too simple at the moment. Let’s take it a bit further then, and add a sense of progression (and competition, since we’ll have a measurement now to compare against our friends).

The simple addition of a size value gives this game some more meaning, and a reason for playing. I took a note from Katamari’s book and did a quick and nasty pull back in scale when you get to a certain size; this doesn’t work especially well when you have no real life objects to scale it against, but it means that the score could go up indefinitely if you played well enough. I could probably clean this game up in it’s current state and release it as a nice little diversionary game. (Needs better physics, better zoom effect, maybe some effects when the balls hit each other)

What would push this game (I think) from a nice diversion to something more popular? Another ingredient, style. Katamari has style, if you were just a ball rolling around picking up random shapes (like in the tutorial) you would get bored very quickly, but given the quirky style, different environments and fantastic music, the game becomes a hit. (And hey, they’re about to release the 4th installment and are barely changing the gameplay, so that shows you how far style can go)

I’m not going to continue to develop this game, because it’s actually been done before. Check out Cosmic Crush. (I’d forgotten about this game when I came up with the idea originally) If I was going to continue though, I’d need to think of something unique, it would need to suit the setting, and (for me) it would need to be easy to draw. So…

That’ll do. Maybe a little too much like Spore to be completely unique, but oh well. (This is a very quick and rough example, but it already gives you a better sense of scale changing and makes it more interesting to play)

Stay tuned for my next gameplay idea, which I’m hoping will turn out a bit more fun!