Mini-Games and Pricing Model

So the ambitious programmers implemented a couple mini games that I think are pretty darn fun, and in its current state, might be more fun than the main game.

The idea of these mini games is two-fold. For eventual monetization, these games serve a way to make money while trying to keep the main game free. There are  a lot of free-to-play games out there and some of them have a friendlier model than others. I'd like to try to find a model that is friendly to the user, but will also allow us the revenue to continue to develop games. So my thoughts right now are (and they could change) to make the levels of Flux free to play all the way through. They're only unlocked when you beat the previous level. If you want to pay $1.99 to unlock all of them you can, otherwise, they're free.

Throughout the regular game there will be opportunities to enter a gate to play a mini game. Right now I'm thinking we'll make that gate available depending on the shape you are. So for level 36 for instance we determine that if you end the level as a triangle, then you get to enter a triangle gate that gives you access to that mini-game. The mini-game is a type of bonus level where you can get extra points, and play around with different rule sets. These mini-games would serve as an in-app purchase and would cost anywhere from $.99 to $1.99 depending on the complexity of the game.

Once purchased, you can play these mini games as stand-alone games that you can access through the main menu, or as games that you play through in the regular game to increase your score.

These mini games would offer the similar functionality and mechanics as the regular game, but with different rules and objectives.

The two mini games are:

Trax came from an original idea for a bonus level that originally looked like this:

Skyler programmed this game and made a few changes now it looks like this:

In Trax, the shapes come at you on four separate tracks, the target shapes are behind the player. You have to shoot them and change their shape to match the target shape behind you before they get to the wall. There's a time limit for this. As the game progresses, the shapes get faster and you score as many points as you can in the time given.  If I were to iterate on this, I would take away the timer, and just have them come at you faster and faster until you couldn't shoot them anymore. 

Flux HiJax was designed and programmed by David Onken, this was an original concept that he came up with, and I think there's a ton of potential here. In HiJax you have flags throughout the level that you'r trying to grab and bring back to a flag drop area. You can only pick up the flags of the same color as you. Meanwhile, turrets are shooting at you and changing your colors. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it's bad. If you're a triangle for example, and you're carrying a green flag and get hit with a green bullet, you change into a square and can no longer carry the green flag. It's a really fun game, I'll post a video of the gameplay in some later posts.

Levels

Here are some of the levels we created the next semester. A lot of them were based on levels I had previously created but had not put in the game. I went back and standardized all the aspect ratios, wall widths, rounded corners and just polished them off.

Interestingly, these walls were created with the intention that the player would have a constant velocity, and would just swipe up or down, left or right to move. Hence the pac-man maze type feel of these levels.

When thinking about this more, however, we realized a shooter where the player was shooting down mazes was not very interesting, and took away a lot of the aiming skill we wanted to exploit in this game. We probably should have prototyped it, but moved away from the concept anyway, and gave the player a free ranging movement without constant velocity.

Unfortunately we didn't change the level design to reflect this mechanic change until very late in development. People were having a lot of the problems with the controls throughout most of development. Most of them would voluntarily put the game down after 3 or 4 levels. They mentioned that the shapes were hard to control, and it was clear they weren't having fun with the game. Even though a lot of them thought the concept was intirguing. There were probably many factors that led to this, but I think one of the biggest factors was the level design.

People were having a hard time chasing down the shapes, and navigating around the mazes, and through the corridors. Add to the fact that the triangle moved faster than the other shapes, it made it even more difficult for the player to achieve their goal in each level.

Finally a few weeks before we were to present we posted new levels. I wanted to have the first 10 levels have no walls at all so the player could focus on controlling and learning the mechanics and the target shapes. The rest of the levels were then very simple. Here are the old levels.

 

New levels

Here are the new levels.

When we implemented these walls, more people played through the levels, and it looked like they were able to grasp the concept more, and hopefully had a little more fun. At this point, in my opinion, game is probably a 6 out of 10. There are a lot of tweaks and changes I think we need to make, but I believe the simpler walls are clearing the way for a more fun experience.

Levels 1-10 look like this, fascinating isn't it?

 

The dashed walls represent penetrable walls. A red dashed wall means only squares and red bullets can go through it, a green means only triangles and green bullets go through. I like the simplicity of the idea and it poses a lot of interesting design options, like being able to hind behind walls as a fort while your bullets could penetrate. You could shoot out, but nothing could shoot in - except bullets of the same color as you.

Red solid lines meant that red bullets would bounce off the wall, green walls meant that green bullets would bounce off the wall. The gray walls meant that all bullets would bounce off, but I'd like to change this to a lighter blue that's easier to discern.

What I really like about this type of level design is the graphic aesthetic that it lends to the game. I played around with square and circle shapes, and look forward to playing around with additional shapes and concepts. I'm very interested in making a game that is not only nice on the game design side, but also has a very strong graphic design aesthetic.

I used a few things for inspiration with the levels. Can you find Piet Mondrian in there? Also, the number 24 is my favorite number.

Fall Semester Prototype

The programmers put a ton of effort into the game and by the end of the semester they put out a one level prototype.

It included:

• the tutorial start screen
• a level including shape changing
• shooting
• navigation
• tapping the enemy shoots

There were, I believe 4 or 5 shapes, if I remember correctly. When I played it, it was the first iteration I had seen where the player could control the shape, shoot, and change the shapes of the other player. 

There was a lot happening on the screen, and it was difficult to know what the objective was, but it was awesome seeing an iteration of the design after so much time on paper.

The programmers showed it to their CS class, and they received some good feedback. A lot of the feedback was that it was a little confusing and frustrating, but predictable based on the prototype. The test did not go how I think we would have wanted, but I wasn't too worried, I knew that there were a lot of changes that we could make that would improve the game. 

One thing that I learned from the experience was that I needed to try to be more involved in the design and development. I had been unable to spend much time in development because of my other responsibilities, and beginning in late November, I started to consider how I might change this.

Name Changes

Throughout the process the name has gone from Flux to Fluxo. We moved to this because there are already a lot of games out there called Flux. We like Flux, but with the name already being used I thought Fluxo might work.

None of the team really liked it too much, so we stuck with Flux. At this point it's probably a problem we'll solve if we publish the game.

Tutorial Screen II

We tested that with users, it worked well, Skyler was able to implement. Here's another iteration we made based on feedback, this made it in the game:

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