So, you see, I’ve never…well…

…

…what I’m trying to say is that this is my first time.  In a game jam, anyway.  I guess technically this other time might count.  Er, actually, disregard that.  No seriously, it’s nothing.

Anyway – I made a game called “Spot Colony.”  Maybe you’d enjoy it!  It’s exploratory and intentionally terse in its instructions, so read them carefully and do some fiddling.

If you’re planning on playing the game, you might want to go ahead and do it before you read the rest of this.  It’s a brief joke and having it explained before you play it would probably spoil things.

—————————

Certified Spoiler Safety Buffer Zone™

—————————

The point of Spot Colony is that it’s supposed to feel villainous without using text or images to do so – at least until it’s already over.  The instructions tell you enough to get you started, but in order to “win” you have to experiment a little, and eventually decide to see what happens if you destroy the whole colony.  Since there’s no prompt to tell you this, it feels more like it was your own idea (though really it’s just the only gameplay option available, so whatever).  Also, the colony is pretty resilient, so winning through luck seems pretty rare.

Once you’re done, you get a dry remark regarding your moral character, which (hopefully!) feels particularly relevant given what has just happened.  HO – HO, art!

There’s a neat emergent behavior with the fire-spreading mechanic (which is based on a simple grid) where it’s an effective strategy to let the colony grow large enough to create thick “fuses” stretching from a food source to the hive.  Also, if you hold fastforward, the colony can overpopulate and chew through resources faster than they spawn.  Spots who do not eat for more than 20 seconds starve, causing colonies to grow and collapse periodically.

As one out of a very small number of game mechanics, the red safety ring has a few important jobs.  it makes it so you can’t just burn everyone by waggling the mouse, but more importantly, since the first two food sources always spawn inside of it, the colony can start out extremely small (to make the later swarms more impressive by comparison) and safely grow for a bit while the player reads the instructions.

Some stuff that I don’t like very much:

– The game isn’t quite as good at guiding people to this conclusion as it should be, so a bunch of players don’t pick up on the overall goal.  Obviously this is a major problem.  Teehee; oops.

– It seems really common for people to try to click on the food instead of the Spots, but since the Spots are congregating on the food anyway it often appears to work correctly.  Confusing feedback means it’s the teacher’s fault, not the class!

– It looks weird.

– I was going to include several ways to interact with the colony, but I didn’t spend enough time working on this to achieve all that, so we just get the fire propagation.

– Other stuff too.