First things first: LUDUM DARE 34 is coming up!
With LUDUM DARE 34 just around the corner, and a cozy room in the Innovationscentrum Osnabrück (Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, 49076 Osnabrück) reserved for the jam on the 12th and 13th of December 2015, it is time for a reflection on TETROMINIONS, one of the entries made in Osnabrück for LUDUM DARE 32 in April.
The original article was written a while ago, April 2015, as a reflection on the first beta version of the NEEDSIM Life simulation, the tool my company FANTASIELEBEN is working on, but I’ll try to keep the following a bit more general. At every game jam it is my goal to try something a bit crazy and off the beaten tracks that could end up with new insights into game design, and I don’t care too much whether it will end up a failure. Additionally, at LUDUM DARE 32 a specific goal of mine was to test the NEEDSIM Life simulation in action.
The theme was “An unconventional weapon”. Themes that more or less force you to work with the ‘kill’ verb in your game design usually don’t make me enthusiastic, as killing stuff has been explored abundantly in game design and can be solved with almost no creativity. But in this case we managed to come up with an unconventional enough way on how and what to kill that I got excited. We agreed on the idea to use tetrominos as weapons to kill minions, now called… tetrominions! A good name means chances are good that an executable concept is on its way, and in fact I think the prototype we came up with during the jam is promising.
We used the first beta version of the NEEDSIM Life simulation to very quickly set up a simulation.NEEDSIM Life simulation allows game developers to define needs for characters and then give objects interactions that allow the characters to satisfy their needs.Tetrominions’ most urgent need is to build tetrominos, thereby changing the playing field continuously. Hard work is tireding, so to make tetrominions look more life-like we made it so that at times tetrominions want to sleep. This need is less urgent that the need to build blocks. Personally I think it is quite a cute spin on the classic tetris game. However, since the jam is about killing, you can kill tetrominions in their sleep!
Getting NEEDSIM Life simulation up and running
As Tetrominions is a 2D game using the x and y axis, and has a very dynamic level, the Unity NavMesh was not an option. We decided to use a free A* tool from the Unity Asset Store. To reuse the NEEDSIM Life simulation code samples conveniently we implemented a new TetrisNavAgent class that manages the details of movement on the third party nav mesh, and thus in NEEDSIM Life simulation only had to change the type of our NavMeshAgent to TetrisNavAgent. Unfortunately there was no time to properly implement how the nav-mesh is re-calculated when a new tetromino/stone is landing, and thus characters make a weird jump when that happens. Furthermore, as the nav mesh was meant for top-down, we had to cheat by adding invisible colliders somewhat above the surface, otherwise tetrominions would fly as in the screenshot above.
To animate the tetrominions we created a MECANIM state machine. By naming the transitions in the same way as the interactions are named in NEEDSIM Life simulation we have a simple way to control the Mecanim state machine with the NEEDSIM Life Simulation, and create a well-organized state machine. After the jam we added some methods to make this even simpler to do.
We found some bugs in NEEDSIM Life simulation during the game jam that are by now fixed. Testing the beta version at this game jam definitly helped in making NEEDSIM Life simulation a stable product, and in fact, thanks to the insights from this jam, during LUDUM DARE 33 the NEEDSIM Life simulation part of the jam took only minutes to get done.
One of the reviewers felt bad for killing the tetrominions, which I believe is a success - simulating the daily life of the characters makes it easy to feel for them as if they were really alive and had emotions. From the reactions I got the feeling that the other jammers easily understood the game, which is not always the case. A number of them mentioned that the idea has potential, and I agree ;)! I think the idea would be worth pursuing a bit more. Unfortunately its not that straight forward to balance the game and make it fun for a longer time. One concern is for example how to deal with tetrominions being locked away if the win condition remains to kill all tetrominions.
I have been hoping to re-visit this game for a while now, so who knows, maybe one day we will sit down together and work on a somewhat better version of TETROMINIONS. In the mean time you can download it from blubberquarks itch.io account.
