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[Wertle]

[EDIT] I finished and released this game! You can see the final version here: http://imaginal.wertle.com/

Greetings all! My goal this year was to finish one of my prototypes as a side project, so I have chosen this one: a little prototype about catching lightning bugs.


You can try out the prototype at the link below. Your goal is to catch the blue lightning bugs by clicking on them when they are lit up (at the moment nothing happens if you try to catch a yellow lightning bug). I want to play around with the idea of having to track something in the dark before you can interact with it, but would like to flesh this out into a low-key, atmospheric activity with some story wrapper. I have someone in mind for final art.

Latest Prototype (last updated 4/8/15

Old Prototypes
v1
v2
v3

For my last big project I had good success keeping a design log during prototyping and am doing the same for this one, so I suppose I'll just copy those entries here. The logs just include play notes, issues I'm running into, and experiments I intend to try. The first one's always a little backgroundy, so bear with me.

Original Play Notes from First Prototype
I made this prototype after musing on catching lightning bugs last summer, and how it reminded me of my childhood. I have this weird rule where I only catch a lightning bug when it is lit, so when they are dark I had to track them, and remember the feeling of them weaving in and out of view against the dark of the surroundings. So I wanted to play with that feeling of tracking in the prototype, and I think that’s coming through. It’s to be a very low key, atmospheric experience and I intend to bookend segments with weird little stories from childhood. Maybe a bit of an autobiographical, nostalgic game. Anyway, the tracking is the important thing.

When I playtested this, most folks who grew up catching lightning bugs said that the katydid soundscape gave them a nostalgic feeling, and they were keen to keep playing just for the atmosphere. Going to do some experiments before I start breaking things out into a bigger structure

Issues
1. I put the jar in that follows your mouse as better feedback when you are hovering over a bug. However, I don’t want this to negate losing bugs as they fly over black backgrounds. Right now it just draws behind the trees, which is weird. I could black out the jar unless lit by a nearby bug, but I don’t know if it would read funky. That would be easy to try at least
2. Because of the hacky prototype, there's a bug where when you catch a blue lightning bug it just sort of teleports away instead of disappearing. You get the gist, I'll fix that first.

Experiments
1. I want to experiment with being able to catch the yellow lightning bugs, but since you’re not really after them, they would stay in the jar and you could use their light to try and find the blue one. But you’d have to let them out before grabbing the blue one.
2. I want to experiment with a panning screen, so that you have to search for and potentially track bugs that fly off screen.

[archieoi]

love working in the dark 

can you capture the lightning bugs yet?

[Wertle]

You can catch the blue ones right now (they make your score go up). For the yellow ones they'll stay in your jar and act as a temporary light and you'll be able to release them.

[Belimoth]

Neat!

[Photon]

Clever mechanic using fireflies and silhouettes like that!

[Wertle]

Latest Prototype

Today’s Play Notes
So over the past couple of days I did a lot of iterations figuring out what to do with the yellow bugs. I thought I’d go over what I tried and why I didn’t use each one.

First I tried having the yellow bugs pin to the jar and provide some light, but you had to release them before you could catch again. This had a neat effect, but kind of changed the feel of the core interaction in a way I didn’t like (it made the loop always “catch random yellow bug, use the light to locate the blue one, then release to track the blue one). I tried a few variations on consequences of this (like having the light fade quickly), but realized that it still took away from the “search and track in the dark” feel that I wanted to explore.

Still, I didn’t want to make the yellow bugs uncatchable, and I’m not sure I want a hard punishment for catching a yellow one, like score reduction (though I might tool around with this at some point). I ended up making a timer with the goal of catching as many blue bugs as possible before the sun comes up. Every time you catch any bug more spawn, so catching yellows has a sliiiight penalty in that more bugs spawn so it becomes more difficult to track the blue. Not sure if it’s enough, yet, but I also don’t want to make this game *too* stressful, either.

I playtested this version with a friend and his tracking behavior was what I was going for (with little vocalizations when he was tracking the blue guy and it went over a tree, or when they lit up and he discovered he was tracking the wrong bug.)

Issues
1. Bugs are a little hard to click, might mess with their collision and make it bigger to see if this is enough
2. In the phase before sunrise, i start removing bugs to try and ramp things down so there aren’t a billion bugs on screen by the time the sun comes up. However, i think this makes it a little too easy too early. Might mess with timing on this
3. When the sun starts coming up you can technically catch a bug at any time, though my playtester didn’t notice this. Not sure it’s an issue, I also might reference it when I start putting in my little story bits.

Leftover issues I haven’t addressed yet:
1. I put the jar in that follows your mouse as better feedback when you are hovering over a bug. However, I don’t want this to negate losing bugs as they fly over black backgrounds. Right now it just draws behind the trees, which is weird. I could black out the jar unless lit by a nearby bug, but I don’t know if it would read funky. That would be easy to try at least

Leftover experiments I want to try
1. I want to experiment with a panning screen, so that you have to search for and potentially track bugs that fly off screen.

[Wertle]

Latest Prototype

Today's Playnotes

I showed the game to my brilliant designer friend, Adriaan, for some feedback, and we came up with some experiments to try. He encouraged me to focus on figuring out the core, essentially experience of my childhood lightning-bug-catching experience, and not to get caught up in mechanics too early (as I often do).

We tried a few things but I'm at GDC this week and so not in a good mental place to analyze how I feel about them, so I'm going to let them simmer a bit. Some things we tried:


1. Desynchronizing the flashes (has a neat effect of the blue potentially being revealed by a yellow, but you lose the rhythm of "in this one flash I have to spot the blue." Not sure how I feel about this yet. Also this would require me to really differentiate the sprite on "lit"

2. Remove the scoring (effect is the focus is more on just the feel of catching bugs, but the downside is there's no incentive to seek the blues right away)

3. Darken the sky but lighten the occluders (good effect of the dark bugs being barely visible over the trees, feels more close to what lightning bug hunting was light. Will be harder to maintain this with transition-to-daylight idea).

After I sort out how I feel about these experiments, my next step will be to tackle some protoypes for a field that is bigger than a single screen.

[Wertle]

Latest Prototype

Hi all! It's been awhile since I updated (conferences, illness, big life changes), but I have been doing a bit more work on this.

I put in the panning and found it made the overall experience feel more like searching and catching bugs. Since the blues are a bit trickier to find now, catching yellow bugs seems alright, and I intend to add some pleasant feedback for them. I also put in some 3D sound on the bugs.

I have 3 modes of flash interval which can be tested by pressing 1, 2, and 3
1 = how it was in the beginning, all of them light up at once on an interval
2 - They light up individually, but on a set interval
3 - they light up individually but on a random interval

As a reward for seeking out the special blue ones, catching one will give a little Lisa-thought or insight, just some little bit of text. It's all test text at the moment but I have a basic system working that will make it easy for me to add lots of little snippets. I also have a plan for the overall structure, which will be a single timed playsession (longer than it is currently).

I also approached my artist about prettying things up and am working out a contract there, woo!

Some challenges
1. bugs need a clearer lit state, since the light from one bug can reveal another so it's confusing as to which is catchable
2. Still need to solve the "jar over tree" issue
3. Need to get rid of "pan" UI when you are on the very edge of a screen
4. Both sounds that I'm using (the singing bowl and the crickets) are cc non-commercial. I'll have to find new, comparable sounds.
5. The game hitches on the first sound played
6. The jar position is lagging behind the mouse cursor position, which feels icky

[Wertle]

Latest Prototype
I finally have some content updates of interest wherein the game is actually starting to look pretty!


Design-wise, I did a lot of tuning on collision, bug fixing (ha ha!) and messing with camera easing on the panning. I think we found an acceptable solution to the "jar over tree" issue.

I took the concepts of my artist, Denae Wilkowski, and put them in the game to get a feel for how they'd work (hence things like non-tiling background, etc.) We're pretty happy with the direction so she's forging ahead to making final assets. Enjoy some concepts:




We decided on the lower left bug, which I think has a really strong shape


We decided we really liked the shape of the upper right, but the color on the lower left.

I'm also working with my composer, Michael McCarthy, to come up with a very light, atmospheric tune. It's important that the cricket soundscape be at the forefront, so we're avoiding anything too melodic. If you are interested, we did a developer stream of our jam session for figuring out an initial direction.

You can watch the composition series here.

In addition to getting final art in, I need to work on the text bits - find a good font that fits with the look of the game and some light sound for when it appears on screen. I also need to get the sky darkening to happen slowly over time (it darkens really fast right now just to test the concept), and get it lightening up to sunrise at the end. Then it's a matter of working on pacing - spawns at different points in the night, and perhaps pacing on text as well (maybe catching blue bugs in the dead of the night yields more solemn insights)

[Wertle]

Latest Prototype
More lovely art is going into the game, and we have new sounds for the night soundscape and chimes! We're trying to decide on which "catch" sound we're going to choose (leaning towards version 4 (try it with the f key, then catch a bug)

If anyone would like to see more in-depth development stuff, I did a developer stream this evening working on this. Most of it is figuring out text parsing and effects (not exactly Construct 2's strong point, so a bit of a rabbit hole) as well as implementing the bit to test out the new catch sound.

I'm starting to put longer text in there as well, though there are still some display bugs. At first having the text gigantic and cover most of the screen was a bug - I was intending it to be small and off to the side, but I dunno. Part of me likes it super big like that. Undecided!

[Wertle]

Hey all, I sort of dropped off with the forum updates as this got further into development over the summer and instead focused more on the streams, but I released it this week! You can check out the final version here:

http://imaginal.wertle.com/