Revising Flydrill

After a year and a half, I finally updated my game Flydrill. Yay.

You just added achievements!

Ever since releasing Flydrill in March of 2010, I've been dissatisfied with the game, and embarrassed to show it to people. It wasn't a bad game - in fact it has been my best so far, but there were just so many problems I saw in it, so many things I wanted to change.

In particular, I thought that they key ingredient the game lacked was logistical gameplay. Later on, I realized that this was just one of many shortcomings, and that the core of the game and the overall structure of it could stand to be improved as well.

So what I've done this past week is improve the core gameplay.

First of all, the arbitrary dream-logic rule that you could only drill to the right is gone, and now you can drill in all four directions. This opens up a lot more possibilities for burrowing and evading through tiles, slipping out of danger through narrow gaps which you can widen into caverns as in the screen shot above. It's also a lot less confusing for new players. Why can I sometimes drill and sometimes not? That question doesn't come up anymore.

Next, I got rid of the extra lives. Now it's one hit and you're dead. Why so cruel, you ask? One answer is that this is inherently a very hardcore game, requiring the coordinated use of many skills and actions, under significant time pressure. I'd originally tried to make it more casual, and weakened the game as a result. Now, I embrace its hardcore nature. Having a single life sharpens the focus of the entire experience. You stop paying attention and you die.

Getting rid of the extra lives also means that you can no longer feel the despair of being down to your last life, with no hope of recovery. The complacency associated with having two extra lives safely tucked into your back pocket is no longer an option. No false sense of security.

And it's much less confusing. Before, I noticed that many people would lose a life and not realize it, never learning the lesson that running into a swarmer is hazardous to your health. Now, there's no question. When you touch a swarmer, you know something bad happened. And because you've learned something, you decide to try again, armed with your new knowledge. Clarity is more important than coddling.

Finally, having a single life makes it much easier for me to balance the game. I've increased the frequency of invincibility halos and decreased the frequency of portals, so that the experience alternates between frantically dashing through clouds of enemies long enough to find a halo and racing to get the most out of your halo while it lasts, maybe taking out an enemy or two just because you can. Halos are not rare experiences anymore. This alternating rhythm is now the core of the game. If you had more than one life, it wouldn't work as well because the game would drag on and on, and the extreme focus of the halo-less portions would be dulled by a false sense of security.

Along those lines, I've also greatly improved the pacing of the game. In Flydrill's very first release, the game started out very slow, and to many players, boring. In response, I crudely ramped up the pace, throwing everything at the player right away. This was not optimal. But I figured that overwhelming the player was at least better than boring them. Now, however, I think I've succeeded in making the game interesting from the very beginning, while also gradually introducing new enemies to the experience to keep it feeling fresh.

The first thing I did was increase the speed of the swarmers. Back when the game gave you multiple lives, the swarmers would start out really slow, and very gradually get faster as you progressed, slowing down whenever you lost a life. Like Pac-Man CE. However, with three lives, this meant that the swarmers started out so slow as to be totally harmless, and eventually got ridiculously fast, neither of which were fun situations.

So I made them speed up much more quickly. To compensate, I made them slow down every time a swarmer dies, whether by colliding with another enemy or with your halo of death. This creates a nice feedback loop - the swarmers get fast, but once they reach the point where they're so fast that they're running into each other, they slow down. And it means that if you can dodge the swarmers long enough, they'll slow down so you can escape safely. But as soon as you travel out of range, they'll have gotten fast enough to catch up with you again and the cycle repeats. This alternating cycle nests nicely with the larger cycle of halo having and not-having, and makes the core gameplay much more enjoyable.

The next pacing improvement I made was to space out the introduction of enemies. Now that the game was interesting just with swarmers, I could wait to introduce the other enemies, without fear of boring the player in the beginning of the game. Puffers come in shortly after swarmers, teaching you to watch where you're going as you dash madly away from danger, and then later the gunners, teaching you to use walls for cover instead of hanging around in the open, and then finally the diggers, teaching you that sometimes a cozy little burrow can be the worst possible place to hide.

Lastly, I made big solid walls appear every so often, to provide some milestones in your rightward journey, and throw in some opportunities for serious drilling. At first I'd assumed that these walls would be very dangerous places, where you are stuck frantically drilling as your enemies nip at your heels, so to speak. But as it turned out, with the four-way drilling now available, these walls became safe havens that I'd look forward to - places where I could burrow safely, feeling through the gaps in the tiles that my enemies could not fit into, where I could be pretty sure to find a halo or two in the safety of the solid wall. Unless a digger stopped by for a visit. But that made it all the more exciting. :)

And the portals, those bubble things that change the background color and clear all enemies from the screen, now have a more pronounced effect on what type of enemy you are likely to find. The colors have stronger associations - red for gunners, green for diggers, and blue for puffers - and the difficulty does not go down so much when you enter a portal. So it's not always something you want to go for, especially if you see a green portal in a nice, safe blue zone. You have to make a choice. And that makes it more interesting.

Also the portals now have big halos around them to make them easier to hit. New players often have trouble with the timing-sensitive flapping controls, and hitting a portal shouldn't be a challenge in itself. But the portals also don't appear as early to tempt these new players either, since the color changes and corresponding enemy distribution changes would totally throw off the gradual pacing I have set up.

The last change was to add a persistent high-score display, inspired by iPhone game Bit Pilot, to replace the now-useless extra lives in the upper-left corner. This game is entirely about pushing your score a bit further than last time, and I decided that I'd give this goal the attention it deserved by making your best score constantly visible as you play.

The other last change, the last last change, was to add achievement notifications.

"Achievements?" you gasp, "How crude!"

Yeah, that's what I thought at first too. But wait, there's more to this than you might at first think. I didn't go with the typical trophy-style achievements, where there is a list of things to achieve, and then you achieve them, and you are told that your achievements have been "unlocked" and now you can see them shining magnificently in your list. I mean, that would require a whole new interface to design and implement! No way!

Instead, I went with the second option.
From Chris Hecker's Achievements Considered Harmful?:

For interesting tasks,

1. Tangible, expected, contingent rewards reduce free-choice intrinsic motivation, and
2. Verbal, unexpected, informational feedback, increases free-choice and self-reported intrinsic motivation.

There's no list. When you do something cool, like travel 1000mm, or kill 10 enemies, or hold a halo for 20 seconds, the game tells you. When you do something even more cool, like travel 2000mm, or even 3000mm, or kill 20 enemies, or hold a halo for 40 seconds, the game tells you again. And that's it.

Short of adding coins everywhere, it's one of the few things I can do to make the player actually feel good about what they're doing in the game, instead of just making them frantic and terrified or temporarily relieved at having escaped with their single life for a few precious seconds of respite inside the safety of a wall.

The only shortcoming is that this feedback is not entirely unexpected, since the pattern is pretty easy to pick up on, and it tells you every time. I might experiment with the game only telling you the first time you do something, making its announcements much more rare and precious. But for now I think the system works pretty well.

And I didn't even have to design a new interface for it. That's the best part. ;)

The changes I'm considering next are more drastic, like adding baby fliers to guide for upgrade points and adding upgrades to spend those points on. Logistical gameplay. But I'm not sure how it will all turn out.

For the moment, I'm just glad that Flydrill is finally, at its core, a solid game. I'm not embarrassed to tell people about it anymore. :)

So try it out and tell me - what do you think?