Lately I’ve been actively observing my processes when I’m working and trying to be analytical about them so I can make best use of my time and energy (physcial and emotional!).

After our latest Scratch game jam I had a thought which seemed relatively important in terms of approaching the production of a game, and maybe about the end product itself.

Last night we made Atomic Nudist X. The procedure was to generate a random name then make a minimal viable product within a short timescale (an hour, in this case).

Before adding it to the code pod game studio on Scratch, I spent a few minutes fixing some obvious bugs and rolling it in glitter, and it occurred to me how lacking it was in any ludic qualities.

We hadn’t gotten around to including collision detection or any real incentive to avoid the baddies. My only motivation was to troubleshoot technical issues - there’s no way I could accidentally start having fun with it as an actual game.

Compare that experience with Penguin Dash by ctrlaltpat. It uses the same basic mechanic as Atomic Nudist X (dodging) and has no explicit reward system, but is tangibly more compelling to play.

It seems to me that ctrlaltpat’s game makes use of the same fundamental dynamics as
flappy bird: the premise is simple, the controls are simple, it looks easy… but it’s not!

Part of what’s happening in both cases, I think, is that the player is primed to play a little childish toy, very straightforward and simplistic. That’s immediately subverted when you die within seconds, and you do a kind of mental double take. Wha- that can’t be right! Let’s go again.

Maybe the next time you have a better insight, you do a bit better, but it’s still more challenging than you think. As a gamer, maybe your compulsion is to keep going, to find the ‘trick’, the method you need to prove to yourself - to the world - that nothing so simplistic could deter you.

Well anyway, it’s got me thinking about rewards and what motivates play. It seems to me that when we move on to more complex development environments like HTML5 and Unity, we ought to have some insight into these things, or we might just end up with the equivalent of ATOMIC NUDIST X - 3D.

(Tom posted a link to this video after gave him a verbal account of the above.)