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Andean Bird 0.4August 23rd, 2006 |
Note: to follow the development of this little project, read 1, 2, and 3.
With this version, the Andean bird game finally actually becomes a game, and not a control prototype. But I’m left unsatisfied.
The very crude title screen
Trying out more controls
Last time, there was a desire among those who tried it to add mouse controls, something I have resisted, and ended up not putting in even to try out just because of the massive rewrite it would entail. The whole core of the engine is built around the flapping code, and if I switch to mouse controls, the flapping would go away altogether. Instead, I think my next step may be to hook it up to triggers on an XBox 360 controller.
But I also hadn’t liked the addition of two more controls for diving and climbing. In the last version, you could use the up and down arrow keys, but as some suggested in the thread, diving is really accomplished by putting the wings into a particular configuration. So I tried to accomplish that. There is now a global “gravity” that is always pulling the bird downwards very slowly. However, if you hold the wings back all the way, you will go into a much steeper dive.
Climbing happens slightly every time you flap; there’s now a real trick to flapping at the right tempo to climb steadily. The island now gains real significance as your “altimeter” because I have still avoided putting things on the HUD.
There are a bunch of implications for this; turning to one side or another, for example, is almost certain to cause you to slip lower, because one wing is held down the whole time, unless you manage to get the timing just right. As a result, flying the bird is demanding more skill.
The issue — it may just have gotten too hard and tiring. How to tell?
Goals and rewards
Without a goal, there was no game. It was all well and good flapping about and trying out this control scheme, but I couldn’t tell how hard it really was. So I added a flight path that you have to stick to. This was also the first opportunity to put in some Andean iconography in; I selected for my arrow shape a textile pattern from Cuzco.
The flight path veers from side to side and up and down as well. I made it tint red when you were too high or too low; it’s unforgiving if you are below it, but there’s a tolerance level when you are above it — when you’re close, it’s blue, and as you get too high it shades to purple and thence to red. If you are flying over it when it is purple-to-blue, you get points, and it turns white to indicate that you “captured” it. Flying slowly along the path earns more points, actually, because the scoring literally increments every time it detects that you are on the path. You can tell when you are below the path because it overlays on the bird.
If a segment of the path isn’t captured and scrolls off the bottom of the screen, you lose some lifeforce. Run out of lifeforce, and the game ends. This is displayed via an obscure white bar at the bottom of the screen, right by the score. I’ve toyed with other ways of showing this — the bird growing translucent, until it finally pops in a shower of feathers, or the game starting out at dawn and moving to dusk and finally night when you’re about to die, making the time of day into a metaphor for your progress.
And the bird should still pop in a shower of feathers. 
Effects
One thing that became clear last time is how much of the experience of this is basically aesthetic. When clouds were added and the island, and especially the music, it made a big difference in the feel. So I spent some time adding effects.
If you recall, the original concept involved “a bird made of light.” I’ve drifted away from that, but it occurred to me that with the clouds and whatnot, I was getting a lot of nice color variation on the screen. So I decided to emphasize that with a full screen motion blur. The way this was accomplished was by not clearing the screen, but instead overlaying a heavily alpha’d color rectangle across the screen. After a few frames, it builds up enough to wipe the screen, but recently past frames remain there for just a few frames. Ths effect made a big difference with the clouds and the bird, but the island gained some unsightly artifacts.
I also added water sparkles, using pathetically simple little particles that just draw ovals. Once the motion blur was in, these gained faint trails (as did everything).
Once I had those, I wanted to add time of day. A simple clock increments when a bar of music ends, and there’s different light color settings for each hour. The actual light gradually moves towards the new target color, and the result is a gradual wash of pastels. If you let the game run without starting to play, you can see the time run by in accelerated fashion.
Once I had that, I kind of wanted a reflection of the sun or moon in the water. I ended up just having a slightly denser cloud of sparkles in the water, and then I made the other sparkles I already had center on this reflection and fade out with distance. For now, this just moves sideways across the screen very slowly, but eventually I can tie it more firmly to the clock. If you can get down there before the lifeforce runs out, you can see the effect up close — it looks like very out of focus sparkles on water if you squint and sit a few feet away from the monitor. Heh.
Where it is now
There’s a variety of goofy bugs — sometimes, your lifeforce just goes crazy, killing you with no indication of why. Sometimes the drawing of the flightpath goes crazy — an artifact of drawing the path in two passes, the bits above you and below you. The addition of gravity and flapping up means that in normal flight, the stuff below does a distracting zoom-in-zoom-out thing, which can probably be fixed by dampening the zoom. The sun/moon reflection behaves erratically bcause I didn’t synch its movement to the clock.
But more importantly, is it doing what I hoped it would? The addition of the game element actually detracts from the overall experience to a degree. Whereas the last version was very peaceful, the new version gets rather frustrating as the wind blows you off the intended flight path and you can’t get back on it (and thus die). Now the controls really are a battle, because the flightpath is pretty unforgiving. Lastly, while flying through the shifting colors is kinda cool, having to pay attention to the path makes you zero in your focus, and so you don’t see the environment. I’d like to add dolphins in the water, other birds flying by, a full tile-based scrolling background with stuff to collect and see, all done with the Andean style… but would you see it? Perhaps the flight path only applies when flying from island to island.
There are some positives. Crude as all the new effects are, they enhance that sensation of a mystical flight. Some of the colors are off, but overall, I like the broader palette. The motion blur isn’t quite what I want, but I can see how it would work. Flying with Z and M and nothing else feels right. And the idea that just flying and mastering those controls can be a challenging game experience is borne out — if anything, it needs to be easier.
To address the flight path, I’d probably still display the whole path, but have waypoint along it that are the only ones that “matter” for lifeforce. That would give more freedom to fly about. A way to regain lifeforce would also help.
The big question still remains the controls, of course.
I’ve got a lot going on with work things lately, so this may be the last version for a while. Let me know your high scores.
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