Here is both the initial design and final design of the loading screen I did for our games jam game. We originally wanted to add the wood to the corner to tie in the main Home Screen with the loading screen but we decided that we needed to add more information about how to play our game without being confused as you only use one button but in different ways.
We decided to give the player a small hint to use the portals in our game rather than avoiding them, I felt the red writing helped it show the player what they needed to do.
Here is the finished main title page I had finished in photoshop. We wanted to go with more of a ‘bendy and the ink machine’ feel to our style of game, so words are wrote by hand and others with dripping effects.
It’s a testament to how fast things move in the mobile world that 2014 already feels like a different era. Cast your mind back to the time we were still coming off Flappy Bird, a phenomenon that inspired a truck-load of one-button games, and Timberman was one of the better ones, with some people even calling it the ‘next’ Flappy Bird. We disagreedwith that premise, but enjoyed the game,…
Word Wars (2013) is an eight-player spelling game built into a custom-made cabinet. With only one button for each player, the cabinet exudes a minimalist, social and experimental approach to game design.
I don’t think I’ve ever detailed the design history, which was conceptualised and finalised in my third year of the Creative Technologies degree. So here it is, below the cut.
The original challenge I set myself was to come up with a casual arcade game that was both physically social and minimalist (Sociamalist?). So, I went with a one button game design: each player only has one button. I didn’t read this Gamasutra article by Berbank Green about one button games, but I wish I had, it’s really detailed! Anyway, this led to an idea of a centrally-controlled game, in which players react to computer generated content. Because the player has limited action/choice, the game must provide a well-structured system which is obvious in its mechanics.
With one button each and a central focus, I found it intuitive and also efficient to base the game around a single screen. So how many players can you cram around a single screen? I was not satisfied making a game with four or six players. Eight seemed like a good crowd. But I soon found out that modern keyboards only allow six simultaneous button presses. This ruled out a simple keyboard hack, so I had to go with an Arduino.
In terms of game content, I think I was looking for something abstract. I know I was also immersed in linguistics research at the time, so maybe that’s how the idea of Word Wars came to me. The alphabet is a flexible set of symbols that leads to a lot of possibilities. So after a bus brainstorming session, I spent a Friday night programming the idea up in Processing:
It was called Linguistic Wars, with eight infamous linguists battling it out for glory. Chomsky, Baudouin de Courtenay, Rosch, Derrida, Saussure, Lakoff & Lakoff, Humboldt and Bakhtin.
When the player taps their button, they pick up the letter in the middle of the screen. But they have to snatch it before someone else does. The player scores points by spelling words - picking up the letters in the correct order. By holding the button down, they can submit the word for scoring, thus emptying their panel so they can begin another word.
I originally had the remove function built into the communal centre - once every so often the word ‘TRASH’ would appear and anyone could tap their button to remove all the letters from their panel. After showcasing it, another game designer (I can’t remember who) had a clever observation: why not use the hold action to clear the letters, when they do not spell a word? Then the hold action is dual-purpose (either score, or trash). It simplifies the mechanic. It also gives more control to the players, allowing them to make the decision when to trash their letters.
I looked up letter frequency tables for words in the English language. That is some tasty reading (not kidding). The frequency that they appear in general is nothing surprising, E, T, A, O, I, N etc... But I also considered first, second and last letter frequency. After a few test runs, I adjusted to accommodate some common complaints: not enough L’s, not enough H’s, and people waiting to finish words ending in D or ING! The dreaded G.
The game is written in Processing, which reads serial data from Arduino. My uni partner Tom had the job of building the cabinet and wiring the arcade buttons (arcade buttons for the heavy-duty win). Wiring and soldering up eight buttons sucks, by the way. For the latest build, I spent a night dedicated to neatly wiring up the perspex lid. Not my idea of a good time. Just an aside here: The longer the wires, the more possibility for interference. I feel like we shouldn’t encourage the wires to fraternise (like it looks like I am doing in this picture with tape). Maybe that theory is all in my head, but I couldn’t get rid of some interference.
A perspex lid improves one aspect of the original build: protecting the LCD screen. Other improvements / lessons learned include: 12 volt USB fans to extract the heat from the cabinet; building a door or gap into the bottom of the cabinet for easy access to the cables; button debouncing and writing a checksum in Arduino to Processing.
I’m pretty happy with my latest cabinet build, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do another one. I feel like I am finished with this game. The most interesting thing at this point is to use the eight buttons on the cabinet in new game designs. More eight player one-button games? Four player two-button games? Two player four-button games? So many possibilities!
