Words: Swamp, Secret

Description: The idea I had from that was to drive one of those swamp boats around and be generally secret. But that seemed like too much of a racing game and not very interesting. I thought a bit about what you could do with a standard racing game to mix it up a bit. I knew that if I was to make a racing game it’d be top down as anything else would have been a bit too complicated for such a short development cycle. Eventually I came up with the idea that the steering of the boat would be broken, and the player would need to use a rope to latch onto different things to steer. This would make excellent use of my new best friend, the rope.

What went right: I think this is one of my most complete games. It goes beyond being a toy with an added layer of rules on top and actually qualifies as a proper game. Whether this is a good or a bad thing I’m not entirely sure. The game has a kind of flow, which you really need to get into to get good scores and I really like that.

What went wrong: It is a bit hard to play, increasing the size of the anchors wouldn’t hurt at all. I tried to make the game zoom out with the speed of the boat but, as usual, due to somewhat hacky programming it wasn’t possible without a major rewrite.

Conclusion: With this game I found a simple, working gameplay mechanic. It’s as I said one of my most complete games. Though this in it’s current state is a better game than for instance Moonlumber, I think Moonlumber has a deeper mechanic, albeit not as simple. What I’m trying to say with this is that if I’d work a week more on both of these games I really think Moonlumber would end up being the better of the two. But, I might be wrong, this game does have a certain appeal. If you add some obstacles, different things to latch onto and bunch of real levels it might become a real killer. It’d make a nice game for the Nintendo DS for sure.