The theme for the second jam was Make it Thinky. We were encouraged to select any genre that we liked, and try to make a thinky experience out of it.
ThinkyGames.com defines thinky as
Thinky games are those that ask you to carefully reason your way through puzzles and challenges; games brimming with curiosity and discovery. If you find yourself thinking through a problem and then, when the insights finally dawn on you, exclaiming “aha!” – you’re probably playing a thinky game.
The first thing that came to mind was drifting. I really enjoy drifting in games. As a kid playing NFS Underground, my brother and cousins were all much better than I was at the driving and racing, but I could always hold my own when it came to drifting.
Recently, I got back into some racing games. I started off with art of rally, and really enjoyed that. Enjoyed it enough to write an extremely long review. Long enough that it exceeded the character limit on the Steam review page, and had to be editted down…
The same people also made Absolute Drift, which really got me into drifting again, and that eventually led me to CarX Drift Racing Online, which is obviously, the longest winded way of me saying that I have been playing a bunch of drifting games recently.
So that was the goal: Make a thinky game about drifting.
Spoiler Alert: The only drifting I did was drifting away from the original idea…
development
The first day, I started off making the simplest possible top down drifting experience I could. I thought I could figure out how to make it thinky later. I had one idea, involving editting bezier curves to control acceleration and steering. But by the end of the day, it really didn’t feel like that would work, so I ditched the idea.
On the second day, I had the idea to “automate” signals, inspired by Bangalore and it’s notorious signals. I thought that linking car lanes to signals might be an interesting way to go, and I set up the basic scaffolding, and it felt better.
The third day was getting all the player interactions working, and it got more interesting.
Day four I set up the level editor, and then it was mostly just putting in the work to get it done.
Day five I spent mostly on level design and final completion things.
conclusion
The game is really clear and concise. The system has a few good ideas, and I think the levels do explore them decently well.
This system specifically seems quite limited. I don’t really think there are too many additions that could drastically add more variety in an interesting fashion.
This kind of system also hints at huge levels of complication and complexity. There are really complicated levels that can be made, but they may not be interesting to solve…
Overall I am pleased. When things were not going great, I managed to pivot, and the whole project is very well scoped and contained. I like it =).
takeaways
I think I learnt a lot this week. A lot of the creative process is based on feelings and vibes. However good an idea might feel in your head, until you have something implemented there is no real way of testing it out.
For me the actual process of coding the whole system out tends to lead to most of the ideas about the mechanics. When I was implementing the drifting, nothing called out to me. I couldn’t see anything interesting emerge, and I think it was the right decision to ditch the idea.
In terms of spending more time on puzzle design, I think I did a much better job. I still think I left it a bit too late. Earlier in development it’s easy to see all the flaws and bugs in the game, and all the improvements to the level editor etc., and get distracted in fixing that. In shorter projects like these I think it is a better call to just live with the jank, and focus on the puzzle design spread out over the course of development as much as possible.
Puzzle mechanics need time to sink in as a designer. It takes time to understand all the systems, mechanics and all the implications therein. I think it’s a good call to spend time in that zone as early as possible so that you spend more calendar time ruminating, and get a better grasp of all that could come out of the systems.
At some level, I think this whole design is somewhat similar to KCPS. It’s the same concept of setup and play and I think the levels I designed showcase something of the same aesthetic. Overall I am more fond of making simpler levels. I also like having levels that are relatively trivial, but are nice to watch as they complete themselves. I thought that was a fun observation.
That’s mostly that. Onwards to next week!