Now that I have a moment to step back I figured, like other people, I do a little post-mortem of how things went with Viral Attack.

Design/Theme:

I figured based on the past voting that “10 seconds” was going to win as a theme. I’d been cooking up a Dig Dug meets bomb disposal game set in post WWI France, s I figured “10 seconds, that’s a timer… bombs have timers DONE and DONE”. However once the theme was decided it felt a bit kludgy to stick a defusal or other strict 10 second rule onto that game so I bailed. This left me to come up with a new idea ASAP. The core idea that surrounded Viral Attack was holding a point for [x] non-consecutive seconds (In this case 10.) I like games that force you to play a mix of offense and defense. The rest became a wrapper around that idea.

Controls:

I’d planned on it controlling a bit like asteroids, but Osmos is a game I really enjoy so I decided to emulate part of their movement mechanic. This turned out to be good AND bad. It’s a really un-intuitive way to move by adding force to an object on the opposite side from where you intend to go, and Osmos does an incredibly good job of introducing that by giving you a little risk-free tutorial, Viral Attack needed this. This control method also ended up giving me a rude awakening to two other things that I stupidly looked over.

1.) Mouse games aren’t that fun in windowed mode.

Especially when you’re only concerned with relative movement of the mouse NOT the actual pointer. I should have forced the game full screen but that would have screwed up the web game and I wanted that to reach the more people…  (Seque!)

2.) RMB doesn’t work on web games.

The whole weekend I’d been testing on Windows without a thought to web. When I finally loaded up the web player I was confronted by this horrible truth and had to go back and add LCTRL support for use on the web. This control doesn’t feel quite the same to me, but was a necessary evil. What I should have done at this point though is generate two versions of the game with/without RMB turned on as required. I didn’t and the web game suffered.

Originally the repel wasn’t limited by stamina but instead you had to hold to charge it and the repel was proportional to length of time held. I liked this as it required a certain about of preparation for defense. I ended up adding the stamina meter to give the virus a reason to move away from the host cell from time to time. This naturally worked well with the repel ability and because a little risk-reward decision “Keep my little bit of meter to push away the white blood cells and escape, or take down the host cell by a bit more…” etc. However I didn’t revisit the control input for the repel button now you were burning two resources (time and stamina) to repel enemies and you couldn’t do it as an “oh shit” maneuver. This became obvious when I watched my wife play the game and saw her furiously mashing on the space and getting little tiny repels or none at all. She asked “Why do I need to hold it?”, and I realized by answer didn’t work any more so I changed it. I think it feels much better now.

I hope you enjoyed this, and the game. Please feel free to jump over and rate it.

Cheers and thanks for a fun Ludum Dare.

– mikegbrown