48 Hour Competition: Explosives (Feb 2009)

1.
Sokoboom (Score: Z/W)
Sokoboom

By Philip Hazelden, Robert Goss and Sam Gynn.

Description

A physics based puzzle game. Get the shapes to the goal by creating explosions.

Comments

Clicky explosion game: more or less complete game, needs a little polish but a lot of fun.

Nice simple premise, solid 2D physicsy control system. Well presented little menu system. By far the most "finished looking" of the three.

Only real problem: would be better if there were more binary goals - e.g. get ball into target area as opposed to get ball into more or less resting state in target area.

Advice: simplify the user constraints for the goal states, re-balance the masses friction models etc. to make the system a little more inertial and floaty to make the interaction a little more forgiving (especially WRT black holes!)

score: Z out of W (where X < Y < Z < W)

2.
Pizza Pandemonium (Score: Y/W)
Pizza Pandemonium

By Philip Broadbent and Sarah Marshall.

Comments

Pizza delivery game: semi-complete game, significant gameplay issues

Top down scrolly 2D game. functionally adequate, problems:

1) relationship between delivery distance and time given seems inconsistent 2) bike handling is poor 3) collision seems a little harsh - 1 hit = death regardless of relative velocity etc.

Again, pretty good for 48 hours.

Advice: concentrate more on handling! In very simple steering games like this, some sort of physicality of control (i.e. ilinx [vertigo] in Roger Caillios' categorising system) is massively important. This game has almost none. Very simple point based pseudo-physics will do very well.

score: Y out of W (where X < Y < W)

3.
DOOMinoes (Score: X/W)
DOOMinoes

By Alan Hazelden and John Pennycook.

Comments

The 3D one with the all the colliding boxes: nice little tech demo for 48hours, but not a game.

There are lots of collision detection issues - it looks like it's only checking the vertices vs. the volumes which won't catch all the collision cases. Considering that it was based on some existing code this is less impressive than it would be otherwise.

Almost no polish, or purpose.

Advice: make a game out of it - just recording some value that measures an activity that the user can improve their performance at over time will instantly make it a game.

score: X out of W (where X < W)