Parallaceur
Author a simple visual story through play
It’s a game about documenting your experience, and how that leads your experience to be worth documenting.
If someone started writing a biography of a living person…
…I suspect that person targeted by the book would very soon find more interesting things to do day-to-day, regardless of how interesting his or her current story might be. Things that are (more) story worthy.
And as an illustration of the inverse: were this tail not drawn, itself a pure visual addition with no effect on the mechanics, then playing this game would be much less exciting.
When a round ends, that trail is all that remains. It is evidence of the journey. It speaks to the struggles survived, the risks taken, the time spent cowardly milling about, and the path leading to inevitable downfall - the line thickness, yellowness, and length tell all.
“High Score” = Best Story Told
Time survived is neither measured nor represented, nor do I provide an indicator of how many obstacles were dodged while playing. Moving at full speed will yield a longer line in less time, but such a strategy is likely to result in a skinny and uneventful line. The “score” - what someone gets to look at and either feel proud or disappointed after each round - is simply the visualization of what risks were taken along the way.
Emergent player behaviors
The constant, predictable velocity of each object size, combined with the tail thickness being increased by proximity to the nearest object, encourages in behavior like “surfing” - running either alongside, in front of, or immediately behind an obstacle to achieve a thick, mostly horizontal line.
Another pattern that emerges is “bull fighting”, in which the player sits relatively still as the obstacle approaches, only to dart out of the way at the last possible moment, leaving a small bubble in the trail.
Inherent in the structure of the game’s right-to-left action is that the further right a line is, the bigger a risk is was to place, since there’s less time to react to new incoming obstacles. A play screen entirely of loops along the right edge demonstrates daring; that very same pattern along the left edge would look like the path of a wimp in dodgeball. Consequently, a new player may tend to draw further the left where it’s safe, while a more experienced player may start drawing further right in an effort to stay challenged.
The line also promotes more playing field exploration. With the line off, it’s natural to keep to one position and play defensively, but with the line present it just “looks wrong” to run loops in place.
The name
It’s a mix of parallax, referring to the binding of obstacle size (”distance from camera”) to lateral speed, and parkour, referring to the frequent slipping between obstacles. The closing screen text isn’t a typo; “re-” is appended to mean “again” as just one more abuse of this neat word.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
The input method for this game is really interesting to me. It’s really hard to control your player when you can’t see the controller and there is no haptic feedback. This kind of control seems pretty common though. It’s a lot like a console controller except even harder to use because an analog stick has a maximum extent so you can’t accidentally leave the control area. It really reminds me of those external tablets you can use with your computer where you draw on the tablet and it draws on the screen. That inherent disconnection between controller and device is pretty generally accepted but it would be nice if we could make input more connected. I guess the Wiimote is a step in that direction, though I still hate it. The Tablet PC could be a pretty awesome platform if someone would develop games for it. Maybe someone working on that team at MS…
February 14th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
While it’s a terrific idea, I believe that someone may have already been working on a tablet games platform. It’s doing quite well though!
:-)
LineRider and CrayonPhysics both seem well suited to TabletPC control. Otherwise, the biggest barrier would seem to be installed user base - the nice thing about a standard PC, web, or cell phone platforms is that a ton of people already own one. Of course, if some combination of good software and lower hardware prices can put a tablet PC on every desktop (lap?), then that seems like an altogether good thing, too. I know my wrist would be happy to get past fumbling with a mouse…