Fungus postmortem


fungusWords: Mushrooms, Power

Description: It was a bit of a struggle to have to start a new game considering the two minor failures that came before. So this time around I took care to choose a gameplay i was sure would work. The game is inspired from something
called “Conways life”, which is a simple simulation of cells living and dying in a grid system. My game had the same type of system, but I did away with the grid. I pretty soon became a problem when all the cells would stack up in big heaps, so I used some code from Popeatron to make them keep their distance.

What went right: The game is more of an evolution from an existing game rather than a completely new one, still, I feel this is the game that I like best of the ones I made. First I did some neat graphics and planned on doing it in a more 2.5D sort of way, but the game really stood for itself without extra graphics.

What went wrong: The gameplay isn’t all that challenging, there’s lots of room for experimenting, but I would really like to try adding in an opponent just to see what it does to the gameplay.

Conclusion: It pays to really think a concept through before starting on it, just having an idea what the player will actually be doing while playing really helps. A bit of luck won’t hurt either. This is a great example of how emergence can make or break a game, the rules for the game are simple but there are endless possibilities for variation.

Posted in Postmortems |