Touch (Afterthoughts)
Finished with my first Ludum Dare game! I had so much fun doing this, and want to thank my friend Chris for suggesting I participate. So, without further ado, Touch.
Touch is a minimalist exploration game that is designed to only be played once. I highly recommended experiencing this game with sound.
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=31841
Continue reading after playing for my thoughts on development, early ideas, and more.
Since this is my first game jam, I wanted to make something with a reasonable scope. I had a few initial ideas after the theme was announced, but a lot of them were too complicated to reasonably pull off or required a lot of assets. I decided to make a minimalist game that could play to my strengths as a developer. With a background in music composition, creating a powerful sound space would be the easiest route.
Once settling on a minimalist game, the theme “You Only Get One” had a fresh new context. Though I felt like it was low-hanging fruit, I immediately clung to the idea that the player only gets one life. From there, I brainstormed ideas to make that one life feel impactful and satisfying, rather than an excessively punishing mechanic when lost. When playing with particle effects in Unity, I accidentally made something that looked like the player’s sphere had a heartbeat, and everything clicked. This particle effect is still used in the final game.
Symbolism really interests me, and I tried to inject as much into the mechanics as I could. The panning out of the camera is meant to symbolize one’s expanding world view as they grow older. Eventually it pans out far enough to see the path that the player has taken and the paths their interactions have taken, representing nostalgia and reflection. The uninteracted grey spheres do not change color at all- the background does. Initially they look cold, lifeless, and uninteresting. The player is a brilliant white light, and the world they live in is also bright and beautiful- the spheres don’t belong, and by converting them to blue to make them belong a bit more. As the player “ages”, however, the background grows dark, and the grey spheres become like stars- beautiful, and at this point, have become very interesting. But they are now harder to reach, or at least seem to be. The player always moves at the same speed- the only thing that changes is how large the world they are moving in appears to be. The trails were not part of the original design, though when I discovered that feature in Unity it was pretty much a no-brainer, and gave a visual payoff at the end.
The inclusion of the Twitter interaction at the end is something I debated heavily, but in the end decided it supported the symbolism of the game and reinforced the sense of an infinitely sprawling community of lives touching lives. The downloaded version includes a feature where it automatically saves a screenshot of the finale, and the idea is that people would post their “lives” using the hashtag “#IWillBeRemembered”. This may have been a little too convoluted though as most players will probably experience the game through the web player, which couldn’t do this functionality.
A hidden feature of the game is the “soulmate”. Each game, 1025 lives are spawned, and only one is the soulmate. The only difference is that the soulmate leaves a different colored trail than the other lives. Since the odds of running into it are so tiny, I wanted to make sure that it maintained metaphorical depth regardless of the way the player interacts with it (most likely not at all). If another life runs into it, it is still revealed as the special one, though no indicator of what it is would be provided to the player. It might pique the curiosity of the player, though.allowing them to draw their own conclusions about the strange colored one. I made sure that the soulmate’s path wasn’t colored in a way that one might assume it is a bug, however. Running into it counts just as much as any other life, however the actions following the encounter could create a unique story for each player. If the soulmate is slow moving, and the player passes them by too fast to notice the different trail, it could have been a story of ignoring someone truly special. If the player sees the trail and pursues it, it could end up as a story of sacrificing their own potential to touch lives by following another. The soulmate was another reason for the twitter/social interaction: I want to see the paths players took on their journey, especially the few that encountered this special spawn.
One of the scrapped ideas was floating text that would quickly fade out indicating what life the player had touched. Initially these would be things only a child could make an impact on: a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, etc. but as the player aged, these would become things like “teacher”, “neighbor”, “son”, and so on. This idea was scrapped to maintain the minimalist feel and to preserve one of two potential outcomes: the “wham” that comes with the end screen, or the sense of satisfaction of realizing it before the end. Hinting it too heavily before hand would cheapen the sense of figuring out the game for those who did guess correctly, and would lessen the impact of those who didn’t, turning a “wow” into an “oh”.
Another scrapped idea was the original gameplay was about spreading a finite amount of light to the world, and then watching the other lives spread your light after you ran out. Spending more time next to a specific life would allow you to fill it with more light, but spending too much time would have diminishing returns, so a balance would have to be struck between quality and quantity. There are many reasons this was removed, but the primary one was again to optimize the experience for the person who only plays the game once. Mastering the balance of light-giving would require the player to play several rounds of the game, and to little payoff since there is no clear way to maximize the number of lives touched. Even if a player figured out the precise amount of time to yield the best effect, I didn’t think it would be satisfying. The system in place where all touches are equal and display the “blown off dust” effect was much more satisfying and also respected the fact that among probably hundreds or thousands of games, I could hope to get one or possibly two plays before someone would move on to the next game.
The suggestion that the player only play the game once is more of a metaphorical tie-in than a gameplay suggestion. While I did frontload a lot of the design into optimizing the first-time player experience, this isn’t to say repeat plays aren’t fun. In fact, they are, and especially to the crowd that would play again- the players that want to try again and touch as many lives as possible after learning how it ends. These players aren’t concerned with getting the “wham” experience again. Granted, it is impossible, but the point stands is that the repeat player wants a high score. Their motivations would have shifted away from the emotions I preserved for the initial play.
The end result I am very satisfied with. Touch was a blast to design and create, and I will definitely be participating in future game jams. Thank you for playing and reading.
