"Super Hexagon":http://superhexagon.com just came out for iOS on thursday, and I have been playing it a bunch. I really like this game, it fits into the way that I play iphone games quite nicely. There are a bunch of specific things that I am enjoying about Super Hexagon. There is a major design change from the flash version in that you are no longer hit by the sides of walls, only incoming walls. This allows for tighter slalom style sections. It also encourages oversteering in some sections, which then makes you lose at yet other sections. One of the overall winning strategies seems to be taking in the whole screen at once, looking far in advance for upcoming holes. This would be totally easy if this was a standard racing game, where you had a good idea of the position of your car based on dead reckoning. Here though, you need to contend with the constantly spinning camera, and remember your past position based on that. The changing number of walls seems to effect this the most because it pushes the potential openings further off the screen. There may be something else going on there with the speed of the advancing walls changing per section too, but I am not sure what it is. The fixed sets of patterns is a really nice choice as well, it makes the game simultaneously endless, and a set of learnable elements. There are some that I struggle with, like the offset by one fast pulsing hexagons in the hexagoner stage, but I think with practice I can over come them. That is really nice to have the feeling of practice in what is an endless twitch game. And speaking of twitch, I like that the hexagon stage isn't really about twitch at all until you creep up on 60 seconds. Maybe it is the hour or so that I have played of it, but hexagon is almost relaxing now. I am glad that Terry left in this slow section.

!https://dl.dropbox.com/u/43672/blog_static/software/images/bad_hotel_iphone.jpg(bad hotel)! The next big luckyframe project, bad hotel is a music tower defense game. It is based on the prototype that is lower down this same page, but extended out into a full game. "Bad Hotel Website":http://luckyframe.co.uk/badhotel

This interview that I did about "Lucky Frame and what we are up to":http://www.indiegamepod.com/?p=2934 has just been posted. We talk about what drives our current projects and where we are looking in the future. It was a chat that gave me about 20 ideas for new directions that we could go in the future, and I hope that it is inspiring to other people as well.

Yesterday I reached a breakthrough in the simplification of the game. I realized that although having a single player avatar gave players a more human connection to the actions that were occurring in the game, it didn't add anything to the sound that was being produced, and in fact the sound was not that interesting at all. I came home, and ripped out the player character, and started rebuilding something similar to an old LD game that I did, "bad hotel":http://jonbro.tk/software/2011/05/01/bad_hotel.html. The other thing that I ripped out was the audio engine that I was using. Although I love the pugs luv beats sounds, I think they were getting in the way of me imagining anything new. "Martin Brinkmann has a really nice set of instruments":http://www.martin-brinkmann.de/pd-patches.html up on his website, so I dropped one of those in. Bad Hotel is basically a tree based system, so I am just traversing the nodes out to the leaves and then looping back to the root. This was the first thing that I sonified. I then added in enemies, to add some entropy to the song making. These enemies are dirt stupid, they just go straight for the root node. There is nothing in the game itself to keep me from going on forever. However, I am setting certain rules for myself, just to make the song more song like. I think that these rules could be written into game systems eventually. They could take the form of either more health on the individual hotel elements, or a certain amount of cash flow that you need to manage as the game goes on. In addition, some of the enemies could aim for the leaf nodes instead of the root node, and this would guarantee that the song would be pruned back, rather than totally falling apart at certain points. The other thing that could be done to structure the song better would be to have certain diffusion limits as the triggers travel through the leaves of the tree. That way you would need to add new power sections to different parts of the structure. If only one of these was sonified at a time, it might give rise to verse chorus type structures.

I have been through a number of prototypes for the follow up to pugs luv beats, and I think that I am closing in on a working direction. I think this is the 5th one in a series of wildly different ideas. Where this post starts, we are thinking about doing a tower defense where the towers are step sequencers. We also are thinking about having a main controllable character for setting up the towers, like the engineer in team fortress. I am going to do this prototype more out in the open than the one for pugs luv beats, at least until someone tells me to stop. Hopefully it will give people an idea of how we work, as well as give me a way to get feedback from a larger group. I will be updating this post as often as I can with new stuff. h2. Notes 14-3 Bloons tower defense 3 does not have any health bar style readouts on the state of the enemies. It displays the states of the enemies as distinct graphics. On the first 20 levels, I only saw 6 states, four of which mapped directly to health states, and two of which mapped to special states. One of these was an enemy that contained multiple enemies. The other one was an enemy that could only be pushed into a killable mode through a special attack type. Revenge of the titans survival mode only had 6 tower types. On further review, this is controlled by the main game tech tree. The six that were opened up were due to the way that I had approached the game. A resource collector, and a tower that buffed it. It had three types of attack towers, but these were effectively all the same, just speed boosts of the base tower. The last tower was a healer for the attack towers. It also had a bunch of one time use pickups, so a bunch of the game was trying to find these on the screen. I think that once the game went past 7.5 mins or so, it stopped doing highlights of these as they random dropped, which made grabbing them a ton harder. The enemies didn't have displayed health, but you could guess how many hits they were going to take through their general size. Also the size of the crowd was a general display of the amount of health that you were going to have to deal with. The large enemies had a health display that only showed while they were under attack. The same for your towers, although highlighting them seemed to display their health. The prototype got this far today: !http://yfrog.com/g0votbp:iphone! h2. Notes 16-3 I started the prototype at this point today: !http://yfrog.com/klj3ilp:iphone! I added the enemies back in, and corresponding lose states. The enemies are a bit dumb right now, they just spawn a certain distance at a random angle from the players base, and move towards it. I think that at some point they should probably move towards towers that are attacking them, and try to take out the players towers. The enemies also drop money that you can use to build new towers, or upgrade your existing towers. I haven't played it to an endgame yet because of some bugs, but that is my first plan of the day. One of the biggest issues with this prototype right now is how confusing it is to look at. I think that by limiting the expansion of the towers so that they cannot overlap, it should create nice textures on the screen as well as removing some of the visual confusion. Also, you may notice that I have a virtual control stick in the bottom left, and two big virtual buttons. I really would like to get rid of both of those things. I may try out the bit pilot controls for the moving the character, but I am concerned that they won't map well to a game where you want your player to end at a particular spot, rather than vacate their current position in a specific vector. This may just be me waffling over details though. I am currently using just blinking graphics to signify audio, but I noticed a few issues that may mean really boring audio. It seems that an optimal strategy may mean that the notes that are playing from the towers will just be a totally steady drum beat. I am not sure how to deal with that, but perhaps putting in actual audio may help with discovering a cure. Will probably use the pugs luv beats sound engine as I have been on all of the prototypes to try to figure it out. Other than those two big issues, I want to add context sensitive towers, so that if you build a tower close to an on screen resource, then it harvests that resource. That may be adding too much complexity, but the only way to find out is to add it unfortunately. h2. Notes 17-3 I added the wave on / wave off mechanics that are present in so many tower defense games. The reason I added that was because the games were going by way too fast. Now that the pace of the game is slowed down, you can start to notice some of the issues. I have also added actual audio, and that is becoming apparent that the way the towers charge up does not make for quite so interesting audio. I have two ideas for how to fix these issues. The first one is to cut out the main avatar. That fixes two problems, one that there are control issues that I have not faced yet, and a simple place towers directly is something that I can handle much more easily. The second is that I may be ignoring what is fun about tower defense, and making a different kind of game. Tower defense is at its core a lightweight management sim. I think what I am making is more about avoidance. I think that by focusing in on just one type of fun, rather than trying to have two types of fun simultaneously, I will be able to make something better. As for the audio component. I like the towers being trigged by the enemies, it adds some computed variety to the sounds that they produce. I don't like the fact that the sound outside of that is such a droning rhythm. One of the nice things about offline sequencing is that you can make really complex rhythms really easily. With this game, it seems that you are forced into making really simplistic sounds for the gameplay to work.