Game JAM: Endless Pinball
An endless runner that puts you in the perspective of the pinball as you use physics based controls to navigate a never ending maze of popular pinball obstacles and traps.
First Steps: The Pitch Doc and Presentation
For this Game Jam, I started with a clear list of features I wanted to accomplish and a specific need and demographic I wanted to fill. My kids and I love to play mobile games but we don’t always have great connectivity. For instance on car or airplane trips, subways in a city we visit. Quick fun and engaging games that don’t require game play knowledge to jump in and enjoy. An intuitive control system that can be discovered through exploration, and a difficulty system that would be fun for myself, and my 10 and 14-year-old daughters. All though normally a two step process, I have compiled my pitch doc and presentation into one step for Game Jam Brevity here:
Click this image for access to the pitch doc (Google Slides PDF)
OOO… Pretty Pictures! Pillars Mood and Reference
I have a little bit of a dark sense of Humor so these Pillars work for me but I wouldn’t expect them to work for a team. I find you need to cater to your audience, If you can incorporate a sense of Humor that helps. The idea of this is that its an endless runner, it never ends, and you could feel trapped. The goal is to create an endless runner that evokes challenge and triumph through intuitive fun and addicting gameplay loops and obstacles.
As this is a Game Jam (the closest parallel to seed concepts and quick turns I’ve encountered from the software application world) it was important to me to hit all the steps, but not belabor the point. Vegas, Neon, glamor, and gangster is the mood. A pinball machine is needed for reference. I grabbed a bunch of pictures from Google, threw them on the second screen, and got to work. I skipped any kind of flipbook or level design for this Game Jam and used my time to figure out the procedural nature of the game mechanics. Floor tile design evolved as I prototyped systems and sticky-noted ideas to the side.
Technical Documents and GamePlay
I’m not going to pretend like a drafted-up full tech docs for a Game jam, but they are my bread and butter as a Product Owner for software application development. I follow a modified SCRUM Methodology throughout the process, but for documents, I begin with a Feature Requirements doc with an executive brief to be signed off on by the stakeholders. After we have an approved feature doc I begin on the component brief where I break down the features into their necessary components. Depending on the technology this becomes a team effort between myself and the software architect. From the component brief, I hand it over for CTO approval and begin working with the agile coordinator on EPICS and finally Backlog and Task ticketing. What i DID DO for this Game Jam was whiteboard out the base structure of the game as an outline for my Blueprints. I used these three graphs as my Hotlist. If I was able to achieve these items I would make my goal, any other ideas or sticky notes came secondary to this core gameplay.
Most important of these diagrams for me are the game loops. I take the time to iterate on these and adjust them as necessary to achieve the player reaction or mechanics I am looking for. This Game-Jam I went tried and true. A simple curve difficulty broken up and capstone by the stages and levels within the game.
For framework I used a Game mode, Save struct and Blueprint interface. The Game Mode spawns the floor tiles on a loop triggered by collision boxes on each floor tile. Spawned actors trigger functions within the Game Mode to keep the game logic in one location for ease of prototyping.
Each floor tile has anchors to attach Child actors too (Obstacles). The floor tile takes in the difficulty settings on spawn and chooses from specific arrays of obstacles based on stage and difficulty. Each obstacle has it’s own code to define it’s unique properties like this fan that sends an impulse to the pinball for more “oomph” on collision. During play testing the bumpers didn’t have the “Pop” or “Snap” on physics alone, so I found impulses helped create the snappy-ness I was looking for.
Difficulties
During crafting the game play I realized that the difficulty was scaling too quickly from stage to stage. I tried dropping the difficulty multipliers in each stage but with the lower variability on randomness the gameplay was too in consistent. Sometimes a stage would be filled with all the hardest obstacles and sometimes it would have none at all. To alleviate this issue I made two major changes. The first was to run a check on the last floor tile spawned, if no obstacle was spawned I forced a spawn on the next floor tile. The second issue had more to do with pacing and making sure that not only the amount of obstacles but the type of floor tiles scaled in difficulty as the stages progressed through a level. I split the floor tile array into three separate arrays, Low, Medium, and High difficulty. At the end of each array I add a new floor tile into each array in increasing difficulty. This helped balance the game to the point where you would expect mass chaos at high speeds, and allowed for younger players to make it further through the game before the difficulty scaled too far.
New Floor tiles added each level completion
Game Jam Completion
At Game Jam completion I have a game I’m excited to explore further. I have taken steps to prepare this for the google app store and work through the process of launching an application there. In my current job I manage the IOS mobile certificates, admin, app versioning as well as QA and beta test flow. My final touch to put on this project was a good retrospective and lessons learned, detailing what I learned and how I could improve, which acted as the basis for this portfolio article. Final Game-jam Demo can be viewed below.
