After finishing my PhD in physics in 2015, I decided to pivot towards video games. I went to some talks and workshops at Tech Valley Game Space in Troy, New York, near Albany, gathered up some tools, and started coming up with ideas, vetting them, and turning them into something playable.
The main product of this period was a game called Plane Defensive. The latest (and probably final) version can be played for free here. This was the end of a long line of prototypes that I playtested at TVGS's Interactive Showcase, which allowed members of the Troy community to try out locally-developed game.
The premise was that the player would be controlling some kind of defensive platform, whose purpose was to deflect invaders from another dimension. To begin with, the platform would live in a two-dimensional plane and deflect invaders that came into it from the third dimension; I was thinking that some day I'd try to create a version where the platform would travel around our own space and deflect higher-dimensional foes.
Working on versions of this game taught me a lot about the differences in what you can expect from people familiar with video games, as opposed to people coming to play one for the first time. Many things that seemed obvious to me required a bit of education, like clicking and dragging objects around. I also saw first-hand how adapting a game to different platforms can be a challenge: for example, tying text to size in pixels is not great when you're developing on a low resolution laptop for high resolution test computers.
In terms of content, I went through a few separate conceptions of how to express that there is a way for the two-dimensional platform to peek into the third dimension. At first I mixed different cameras, but eventually I decided that the most convincing detector would simply point towards the projection of the high-dimensional being onto the play space - given enough directional detectors, the invaders can be triangulated and anticipated. I also played around with using stereo sounds for some of the challenges. The visuals were very "programmer art", and the sounds were simple generated effects.
You can see a full play-through of pretty much all of the versions, along with a more elaborate discussion of my process, in this video, part of a series called Devs Play, hosted by TVGS for a span of time. Enjoy!
That was fun to try out. That the invaders are kicked out, rather than destroyed, reminds me of your approach with insects that invade your home. I like this approach very much, but do you have thoughts on the lesson Spock learned in "The Galileo Seven" episode of Star Trek TOS? Once the attackers realized they weren't really hurt by the nonlethal response, they were enraged and redoubled their attacks. By the way, I skipped reading the text above the red line at first. For careless readers like me, adding the adjective "two-dimensional" to modify "cities" in the first sentence below the red line would help in understanding the second sentence below the red line. Thanks for writing about this and linking to the game.
ReplyDeleteI haven't really watched any original series episodes in quite some time, so I don't recall the one you speak of. Thanks for playing, and for the feedback, which I've incorporated.
DeleteMy pleasure.
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