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[anselm_eickhoff]

Dear TIGers,

For this christmas, I made:

Distracted Goose

I hacked it together with Construct 2, even though I usually do most things myself.
It may still be a bit rough around the edges, here are some issues I am aware of:

• The ground looks like clouds at first sight
• Tapping too often results in weird flying
• Might need a happy end
• Performance is bad in Opera and weak devices in general
• It is quite hard

I hope you enjoy, let me know what you think!
Also tell me if you feel something is missing or needs to be changed.

Happy Holidays!

[anselm_eickhoff]

Happy New Year!

Today I made some modifications to the game:

• Slightly different terrain style to look more like snow
• Flight model tweaks
• Plant distribution tweaks
• Fixed a bug where eating stops randomly

I would really appreciate some feedback 
Thanks for playing!

Play Distracted Goose

[anselm_eickhoff]

Only a few people have played the game so far and no one has commented here,
which might be my fault (boring wording, game is not special, let me know!)

So to bump it again, here is a little behind the scenes:

Stupidly simple procedural terrain

1. Make a single-colored blob of generic terrain
-> should be easy to approximate by a polygon, as a collision shape

2. Create a string of copies of the blob to form your landscape
-> make sure they overlap, so you can't see the single copies anymore
-> can be done on-the-fly for infinite terrain

3. Randomly rotate and flip the copies for maximum variety

4. Add random y-offsets between copies for more bumpy terrain
-> modulate this randomization for awesome emergent changes!

In my case I did this:

next_y = sin(next_x/const_period) * random() * const_amplifier

I chose the constants so that the player starts out in smooth, flat terrain,
then after ca. 1000m it is very bumpy, becoming smooth again and so on.


Result in action:

Play Distracted Goose


Questions?

Was something unclear?
Not sure how to implement it for your game?
General questions about procedural stuff?

I'm happy to discuss!

[IzzyReggie]

Tried your game out... sorry to say it isn't my style.

I found it impossible to eat berries. I couldn't get close enough to the ground to get to them without crashing. I also had weird, swooping performance, where the game would operate almost like a sin curve (fast/normal performance degrading into slow/stuttery performance returning to normal performance)
Have no idea what that was, but it was really weird.

Might try your procedural terrain generation technique to make some test levels for a destructible terrain test project.

[anselm_eickhoff]

Hi IzzyReggie, thanks for your feedback!

I'm sorry to hear that you had performance issues - it seemed to make an already hard game impossible and frustrating

Could you please tell me which browser and device you were using?
Does it support WebGL?

Thanks for your help!

[anselm_eickhoff]

After some more playtesting, I made some changes:

• Added frame for energy bar so energy loss is more apparant
• Players now start with reduced health, so they have to work out plant eating earlier
• Shortened instructions
• Some performance optimizations
• Added Twitter and Facebook metatags to be sharing-friendly

By the way, I've got an interesting disparity between players who say that it's way too hard and others that say the difficulty is exactly right and they like the challenge...

Play Distracted Goose

[Joe_Reynolds]

I played the game, I got to about 2700 meters and then just got a bit bored to be honest. It needs more 'stuff' maybe the choice to go faster at the expense of fuel/berries? Maybe points for reaching a certain distance which you can then spend on improving your goose?

I don't know, right now though it is just a bit aimless

[anselm_eickhoff]

Nice that you got so far!

Yeah, I thought that it would get boring after a while - I only hacked it together as an arcade-style mini game. I don't know if I want to add more mechanics or content, since I want to focus more on my other (main) project.

Do you think a global leaderbord would be enough to make it more interesting?

[Joe_Reynolds]

A leaderboard would definitely improve it and for what it's worth, I think the trees are quite easy to get to so I wouldn't try and make it any easier for people but that's just my opinion

[geepit]

I really enjoyed this, although sometimes the bushes are hard to get its pretty cool when you manage to swoop down grab it then swoop back up.
I did however experience long stretches of no bushes at all which would lead to me running out of energy and crashing, but this was only if i missed the early on bushes so i guess having the low energy to start with could be the reason.
Overall pretty fun as an arcadey type game, a global leaderboard would definitely add to it

[anselm_eickhoff]

Joe: Thanks for your input and interesting to see that you find it easy.

geepit: Thanks for describing the playing experience so nicely! I'm glad that you liked it.
The bushes are distributed with true, brutal randomness, meaning there could theoretically be stretches of any length without bushes at all. I might change it to "friendly" randomness or just add more bushes in the beginning.

Regarding leaderbords:
I might try out the Meteor Platform. I could also build something myself with node.js or Erlang, but that might be overkill.
Also I'm not quite sure how leaderboards could fit with the tone or "story" of the game...

[geepit]

Ah cool, a friendly randomness could be good even if it was as simple as checking whether there hadn't been a bush for a certain distance then putting one in. But to be honest it wasn't that big a problem as it didn't happen too often.

Yeah, fitting in the leader board with the story/tone could be a problem, maybe if you displayed it in a way like "Your fellow geese migrated this far:" so display it in context rather than it being just scores (if that makes sense). Also an idea instead of having highscores could be to have an end where you meet the rest of the birds and then you could show how many other players reached that far or something like that.

[anselm_eickhoff]

Hmm, so it might have a happy end after all...
But then I'd make it really hard to reach like 8km or something (best players that I know of are in the 5km range). It fits the story and gives closure (which might be a good thing).
Also the distance then wouldn't be relative to the start point but remaining distance to your flock to be more motivating.