Game in Zero Hours: Disguise

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 3, 2014

I kinda forgot about the Zero Hour Game Jam challenge until the night of the jam. It’s the speed jam to beat all speed jams – to make a game in ZERO hours. You really can’t go faster. The game jam takes place inside the hour that “disappears” during Daylight Saving Time’s fall time change.

Making a game inside that phantom hour is challenging to say the least. I didn’t quite pull it off. I went 45 minutes over before it was truly playable, and then spent another couple of hours the next morning making it suck less.  So – I failed, but it was still a game made in less than 4 hours (not including the time to package it up and distribute onto the web).

So I present – “Disguise”, a game attempted in zero hours!

The inspiration for the game was one of the random themes they that you can generate on the 0 Hour Game Jam website. The theme was… “disguise.” My original thought was that you’d have all these big titans fighting each other, and that you’d switch your uniform as you slipped past them, but if they saw you they’d attack you (briefly) instead. The only part that lives on in that idea is that the blocks you have to avoid can push you back even if you don’t touch them – you just have to be “close.” Something I’d change if I ever go back and change it.

Anyway – you control a little circle. Your objective is to use the cursor control keys to move to the goal box within 20 seconds. But there are a bunch of moving blocks of different colors in the way. If you get too close to a block, it will push you back. You can disguise yourself using the number keys (1-4) so that you become “immune” to that color block. You can do this even when you are being pushed backwards (to avoid MORE pushing if you get knocked into other blocks) .

If you reach your goal, you immediately restart in the next level, which is harder.

You cannot change your color to gold, so you can never become “immune” to the gold blocks. Gold blocks start appearing around level 11 or so.

One of the ironic things about the game that I discovered playtesting it (part of the dev time) was that as the game progresses, your disguise ability becomes less and less useful, and it becomes more about straight-up avoidance of all blocks if possible, with occasional use of the disguise ability to get through a tight spot. More challenging, sure… but kinda invalidating the point of the game.

Overall, I was kinda pleased with how it turned out, though I was less than pleased that I couldn’t make it playable within the “zero hour” time frame.

WHY BOTHER?

So the question must be asked – what’s the point of such a super-short game jam? I mean, with a 48 hour jam, you can actually experiment with ideas, or build a prototype of an idea for a game that you might actually want to turn into a full-fledged game project at some point. You have time to do things like polish and prep for a release, of sorts. But making a game in just a few hours (or less, for 0hgame)? What value can you get out of this?

Having done this three times, I submit the following:

#1 – It forces you to think of game mechanics on the utmost basic level. You don’t have room for complexity of interaction. You don’t even have room for much by way of graphics. You have to think: “What is ONE activity that might be fun for players, and how can I implement it quickly.”

#2 – Practice getting “in the zone” – one thing I feel like I need practice doing is getting “in the zone.” The zone is a magical place where you can go as a creator and get stuff done. In something like the 0h game jam, you need to deliberately eliminate any and all distractions, get in “the zone” quickly and rock it for an hour. Or more. I wish I could do that all the time – I am easily 3x more productive when “in the zone” than out of it. I think it can be a learned habit.

#3 – It has close to zero impact on schedule. I feel bad taking 48 hours “off” of what I should be doing to do a game jam. But something like this is the sort of thing that can be lost in the noise as far as schedule (I probably spend more time per week getting lost in distractions when I’m supposed to be working on my game than I spent working on this one).

#4 – It helps you get a more realistic assumptions of development time. How much can you REALLY get done in an hour? Two hours? If you can truly get in the zone and work like crazy on something like this, it represents the upper limit of your productivity. So later, when you are trying to figure out a realistic schedule for developing the player control scheme, you’ll know it’s not something you can whip out in a single evening, even if you are at optimum productivity. Or maybe you can. Also – I found I spent most of the morning after putting in feedback mechanisms into the game. It was a good reminder that while the game systems were kinda-sorta working and it was technically playable the night before, it was kinda useless for anybody but me until I did things like make the player cycle colors when being pushed back, or added the score / timer / level counters. That ratio isn’t too different from any other game. The mechanics can go in pretty easily, but it’s all that other stuff that makes it truly playable to others.

#5 – Its good practice for speed-testing your skill with your tools. You may think you know them, but how quickly can you whip out a basic texture or code up simple AI when every second counts? And if you stumble somewhere, is that something you should spend some time practicing or learning about that part of your tool.

#6 – And lastly, while the results of the jam aren’t going to be something to write home about, it’s a lot of fun, and whipping something together that quickly as a technical challenge is pretty satisfying.

 

 

 

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