Notes on My Process and Motivations

Now that I have a new version up, I wanted to take a moment and make note of some of the ideas driving my development and what kind of a game I want Bird Panic to be.

Exposing Game Mechanics

I've tried my best to communicate aspects of gameplay in intuitive, visual ways.  I don't like to play games where you need to consult a guide or keep an Excel sheet just to figure out how the game works.  I think I've made some progress toward my game being more like bunch of exposed gears than a black box you have to reverse-engineer, and I have some more ideas to that end.

I've also tried to create what is sometimes called an "invisible tutorial", conveying gameplay without overtly explaining it to the player.  I have really mixed feelings about this idea.  I think trying to do it is an interesting exercise in design, but I also think its effectiveness is seriously overestimated and often the product of ad hoc assumptions about old games.  

But, like I said, I think trying to do it fun and interesting and I think I did okay at it.  The first level hints pretty strongly at what movement options are available, and the next two levels about the mechanics of food.   But I also added random tips on the screens that pop up at the beginning and end of the levels.

Rewarding the Player for Strategic Play

Something I've strived for in this new game mode (with mixed success so far) is to create a game that can be played strategically and thoughtfully and, of course, to make sure that the player is rewarded for doing so.  This has required a lot of time tweaking things like the timing for pickups to be generated and ratio of different pickups available.

The result has been a game with game mechanics that can be learned and taken advantage of in a thoughtful way to get higher scores.  Unfortunately, those scores aren't always higher than if you just run around grabbing pickups at random as quickly as you can.  You can still get pretty high scores by grabbing random things and getting lucky (and I think partly by virtue of getting more pickups in total).  However, I think playing strategically usually gets higher combos, so I might just add extra rewards for getting high combos so that they count for more.  

Granted, the game isn't super complicated, but I think there's more nuance to the strategy than first meets the eye for instance (spoiler), at first it seems like you should just get turnips first to increase your multiplier, then get the fruit.  But you probably won't have enough time to get all the fruit before your combo timer runs out.  You have to ration out your turnips if you want to keep your combo level high.

I've also tried to mitigate the possibility of bad luck with the addition of limited level retries.  I know that there's a trend towards artificially smoothing out randomness because most people don't understand probability well or think it makes the game less skill-based.  I've done this a little, but I'm hesitant to do it too much because I feel like it will just make each run feel kind of same-y, and this is currently a game where you have to start over each time, so that might be bad.