Magnibox
RULES
Points added per frame equals the number of dots in play during that frame, but if you touch any dots (or the edge!) you lose a life. Chaser dots spawn in at a constant rate and die the moment that they leave the play area.
In the case of Magnibox, I’m quite pleased by the ratio of time-in-development to total enjoyment.
Total Enjoyment = (time spent playing) * (value per moment playing) + (novelty/style bonus)
I experimented briefly with making the player’s dot size larger or smaller than the others, changing its color, etc. and eventually settled on having it completely identical to the other dots. The change in visual representation surrendered much of the mystique to me in what this task demands of a player’s selective attention and sense of embodied control.
By selective attention, I mean that the dot in the player’s control is special in a way tied to how the mind sees - how it processes and adds meaning to visual input - versus how the eye sees. That it doesn’t move with the same patterns as the others makes it visually distinct, but only in a way that a photograph, painting, sketch, screenshot or similar snapshot recreation cannot easily convey.
That the dot’s only visual distinction is its movement patterns interests me for the same reason that no picture of a squirrel can look like a squirrel, because the visual signature of a real squirrel has as much to do with its unpredictably jerky spurts of movement and smoothly animated fur/muscles. Of course, the movement is tied to what you do, but that leads directly to the next point:
By embodied control, I’m referring to the phenomenon of training procedural knowledge wherein an interaction participant comes to seamlessly consider their tool/vehicle/avatar a direct extension of self. When my car is hit from behind, someone hit “me”; a talented swordsman may appreciate a wielded weapon as a natural extension of the arm carrying it; with computer games your on-screen representation or given viewpoint “is” you. I mentioned this topic in greater detail within the post dissecting UnicornSlaughter.
When you look in the mirror, how do you know that the person looking back is you? In cognitive psychology this is called the Mirror Test (very young human children fail it), and it’s at least in part because you are able to mentally connect your own actions to those immediately observed. If such a correlative observation of mental-cause to perceptual-effect is partly the foundation of identity, and other things in the world react to what we do, why do we not more commonly encapsulate “external” pieces into our sense of identity?
We do, of course. In the example stated above, it was the car… but what if instead of thinking of the situation as:
PLAYER : DOT :: DRIVER : CAR
Can we extend that perceptual frame out further (?) to:
PLAYER : DOTS :: DRIVER : TRAFFIC
That is, the other domain that I intend to explore by all dots being visually identical, combined with all dots responding the mouse dot (attracted to it), is the idea that you are not just the starting dot. You play as all of the dots.
All dot movement is driven directly, instantly, and consistently by the spatial relationship between the smoothly moving dots (mapped indirectly to your mouse movements) and the unpredictable, jerky dot (mapped directly to your mouse movements). It’s pretty obvious that in StellaBreakout you aren’t playing as the bricks, but then, the bricks aren’t repositioning constantly based on your movements.
This latter question is abruptly trivialized, I fear, when the ‘first dot’ (not really any more the “player’s dot” than any other) is touched and all other dots disappear, leaving the only entities on screen that persist alongside the player’s lives the boundary (which cannot be controlled) and the first dot (which behaves only via directly mapped intervention). Because of that conceptual break, I’ll probably need to brew up another little game sometime soon to delve deeper into this particular question…
December 2nd, 2007 at 4:04 am
[…] I’ve been wanting to do something with magnetism for awhile (where do you think Magnibox got its name?), but this was my first crack at using polarity. Coincidentally, this was also my first ActionScript game to use mouse clicks and external images. Two things about SkyBubbles stand out: […]